In today’s world, business functions by providing customers with relevant products that nullify existing problems. Have you ever wondered how startups and multinational corporations come up with innovative products to tackle user problems? The secret is Product Management. The Product Manager synchronizes the Engineering, Marketing, and Sales team to work with a unified vision and goal.
That is why Product Management roles are an intersection of technology, user experience, and business models. A product manager is responsible for managing a product’s progress, starting from the initial ideation phase until it reaches the customers. Product managers usually do not have an evaluation procedure for the initial initiatives needed to build the product. So you need to have a definite plan to frame the best product management strategies. A well-framed product management strategy helps you bring the best product in the target market and help your organization grow.
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Here we discuss the series of steps you can follow to create a product management strategy.
1. Get to Know Your Prospects
The main aim of an organization to develop and launch products in the market is to serve customers via the best product management strategies. Speak to your potential customers and collect as much information as possible. You can collect demographic details like age, location, occupation by survey forms, social media chat, or asking for one-on-one feedback. Having demographic details help you develop your client’s user persona. A user persona will help you know the kind of products needed to satisfy your target audience. Information gathered from customers helps to evaluate the market risks associated with your product.
2. Have a Clear Vision of Your Product
The next step is to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve through your product strategy. Your achievements can be anything ranging from increasing sales to expanding it to a new market. One thing to keep in mind is that every product is unique. Thus, there should be different product strategies.
To have a clear notion of your product, you must try finding similar products. Conducting thorough market research will help you know about the problems faced by your competitors while building similar products. This will enable you to find more opportunities and have a clear understanding of your product.Â
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3. List Your Product Goals
After you have a clear vision of your product, the next step is to find the high-level objectives achievable using your product. For instance, if you are a product manager at an e-commerce company, your main goal is to attract new buyers and enhance your existing buyers’ satisfaction. You could treat these parameters as your Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) measuring your product’s success rate. Make a list of the goals you want to attain and sort them on a priority basis. Following this approach will help you make a concrete plan for design, attributes, functionalities, and other relevant aspects of the product. Â
4. Analyze the Management Tools Present
Before you start your journey to design a product management strategy, you must spend time evaluating the management tools at your disposal. This is important as it helps you know if the tools available are enough to devise a management strategy for the new product. Using appropriate tools and frameworks will help you automate mundane and redundant tasks, enabling faster testing and launching your product. All the teams play an integral role in developing the product. You must ensure good communication between the teams so that all team members are on the same page as a part of best product management strategies.
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5. Build a Roadmap Adhering to the Product Goals
Creating a roadmap is combining all the steps mentioned above. Here you devise a strategy to align your product vision with your product goals using the appropriate management tools. Having the goals set in mind helps you focus on the initiatives that form a vital portion of the product roadmap. These initiatives lay the foundation for success for a product as best product management strategies. The product roadmap enables you to assign tasks to individuals or groups, elucidate the workflow, and improve communication between team members. Thus, having a well-defined product roadmap reduces the chances of committing an error.
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6. Monitor if Your Plan is on TrackÂ
At this stage, you have a crystal clear product vision that you can convey to your team. You have a set of objectives to achieve adhering to your product vision. A strategic roadmap defining all the initiatives and supporting your product objectives is at your disposal. You are ready to start building your product with a sound plan. Evaluating your product’s performance on some Key Point Indicators is essential to know if your plan is on track. The performance evaluation is a key metric for measuring the success of a product. However, things do not always go as planned.Â
You can have a strategic roadmap ready, yet not be able to follow all the steps mentioned. This can arise due to numerous internal and external factors like change in priorities, market trends, budget constraints of a company, variance in user persona, to list a few. Business is quite tricky. When you move ahead with your initiatives, you need to keep a tab on how your planned strategy works. The market trends are quite volatile. Thus, you may have to make certain readjustments in your product management strategy to thrive in the industry.
Must Read: Future Scope of Product Manager in IndiaÂ
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Wrapping Up
Having a clear product vision and early planning is necessary to frame an exemplary product management strategy. In this article, we have discussed the best product management strategies. Periodic monitoring of your strategy is essential to know if the product progress aligns with your vision. A product manager plays one of the vital roles in the make or break of a product. Thus, a product manager should carefully discuss with their team before finalizing the product roadmap.
If you are highly intrigued by what you read, you can enroll in the Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management offered by upGrad. The certification program delivered by experts will help you kickstart your career to be a successful product manager.
What does a strategic product manager do?
The strategic product manager of a company is in charge of creating and sharing the strategic vision of a product. Their role involves analysis, exploration, and strategic development, along with daily stand-up meetings, presentations and customer interviews, and many other tasks. Interestingly, even though this is a highly strategic role that is vital to the organization's success, senior leaders feel that after balancing a million tasks, there is hardly any time left for strategic thinking. Strategic product management also includes critical tasks such as developing the product's vision, roadmap, testing, strategy, product launch, and cultivating ownership among the teams involved.
What is the role of an associate product manager?
Associate product managers are generally new to the field. They have to frequently report to the product manager and also have to support the product and the other members of the product team. Associate product managers are expected to learn on the job and simultaneously facilitate the main aspects of product management. They must come with strong fundamentals of the industry or domain; having relevant industry experience is an added advantage to becoming an associate product manager. They might own a specific product feature, but the entire responsibility of the product might not be handed to them.
What technical concepts should a non-tech product manager know?
Product managers are not really expected to bring a lot of technical knowledge with them. This is mainly because deep technical knowledge is not a vital requirement to fulfill their responsibilities. However, some technical areas can be worth knowing to be an effective product manager. Firstly, it is crucial to be familiar with analytics in this data-driven world to be able to utilize quantitative data. The product manager should also be familiar with A/B testing to understand the real-world feasibility of product features. They should also understand information security and Agile (though Agile is not technical) development methodology for smooth project execution.
