Good Product Management Builds Lasting Businesses

Traditionally, clients of software-services firms don’t realize they need help with product strategy. They believe the relationship is simply providing the vendor with a specifications document according to which the vendor then delivers a product. But that mindset is changing because there are so many instances of really awesome product releases that just don’t take off, or that do, only to become another victim of market innovation and disruption.

There is no shortage of good ideas, but most of them struggle to get traction in the market. Product strategy helps bring clarity to this problem. Product strategy will help the client understand user-experience scores and whether product features are missing the mark. It also analyzes whether the product marketing plan matches the product or whether any recent innovation is disrupting the industry. Sound product management facilitates the assessment of the current situation and the development of strategies to grow business revenue.

Strategies to get feedback from the target market earlier in the development process help improve the quality of the product. A fast-paced production space yields the best time-to-market timeframe. Though product mistakes happen, the objective of good product management is to validate assumptions sooner and to develop strategies for continuously re-evaluating how well a product is meeting market needs.

Today, product strategists are tasked with designing the appropriate focus group strategy—when to hold them, what to ask, how to ask it; and with giving operational feedback—what data to collect, what to do with it, how to put it to the best use.

In many instances, customer satisfaction scores are lower than industry benchmarks. But to discover this, a business must know what the industry benchmarks are. Product strategists can help measure customer satisfaction by identifying and prioritizing features that will improve a product. They help clients get to a place where they can make measured decisions based on the available data.

For clients that serve a diverse group of customers, product strategists can help in two ways. They create user personas and scenarios in order to better identify features that will smooth the user’s conflict; and they work on requirements that address vastly different users’ content and timing needs (early adopters versus change-averse).

Customers expect feature upgrades more frequently than many businesses can deliver them, and if a business does not react swiftly, it faces the risk of losing market share. Product strategists help navigate the business and technical aspects of a situation. They are able to identify the technical problems that the business experiences and are able to recommend solutions that can improve top-line revenues and decrease costs.

Product management consultants can be great problem-solving partners. You just need to find the right match, and then trust them. As Warren Buffett says, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”