Never underestimate the value of getting the product right

This is the first post in a series of Keplar blog posts on the importance of product management in building and developing businesses.  Product management is already a well understood discipline in the technology industry, with product managers playing key roles at both established technology firms and start-ups, on both sides of the Atlantic.  But this series of posts isn’t written for these product managers – rather, the purpose is to inform people outside the technology industry, especially those who are looking to start using digital tools to drive business goals, about the importance of product management as a business discipline.  It is our experience that people outside the technology industry often don’t understand the key role that product management plays, and neglect the discipline at their peril.

By way of an introductory post, we first look at the responsibilities of a product manager, before considering what value a product manager adds:

What is a product manager responsible for?

In a technology company, a product manager is responsible for an individual digital product, be it a website, an application, an iPhone app or some other product.  In most cases, the product manager is judged by the commercial success of that digital product:  how much profit it generates, which in turn depends on the number of users it services and the amount they pay, which again depends on how much value the product provides for those users, and how much they love it.

We can identify five key responsibilities that the product manager has:

1. Provide a high level vision for the product
   • A product manager takes a set of requirements and turns it into something that looks tanglibly like a finished product. That means he/she takes input from:
     1. Customers/users, to understand what their need is that the product meets
     2. The business, to understand the commercial objectives for the product
     3. The engineering team, to understand what is and is not possible, and what the relative costs/complexities are of different possibilities
   • Out of that input, a product manager will provide:
     1. A conceptual design (based around the key needs/processes that a customer/user will fulfil using the product)
     2. An information architecture, which makes the product intuitive for users to navigate and use
     3. Workflow design
2. Work with user interface (UI / UX / UE) and graphic designers to provide a detailed product vision
   • The user interface expert will “fill in” steps / screens in the workflow to enable users to interact smoothly with the product
   • The graphic designer will give the complete product a visually appealing look
3. Provide a roadmap for the product’s development
   • It’s not enough for a product manager to provide a vision of the perfect product. The product manager needs to work with all stakeholders to work out what can be delivered in the available budget, which features need to be developed first (and so which need to be prioritised) and how to manage the ongoing product development. That entails:
     1. Working with the development team to understand the cost/complexity associated with individual features
     2. Working with customers/community managers to understand which features are high priority and which are low, and how to group features into sets that add real value for users
     3. Understand the commercial competitive environment to work out which features are likely to have a big revenue impact, working especially with the executive team, business development, marketing and sales
4. Monitor and adapt the product roadmap depending on new insight
   • Use a combination of quantitative analytics data and qualitative customer feedback to understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what previous assumptions about the product and user community were wrong, to identify how the roadmap needs to be updated
   • Manage that change process with all stakeholders (including the development team, the executive team, and the marketing/communications team)
5. Provide a ‘customer-minded resource’ for the rest of the company to draw on
   • Make it easy for all other teams in the country to draw on the product manager to understand the customer’s perspective, and use that perspective to inform decision-making

So what value does a good product manager provide?

So, if these are the key functions and responsibilities of a product manager, then what is the value that a good product manager provides to a business?

1. Increasing product take-up, product popularity and customer loyalty
   • By ensuring that the product built meets a real user need, and the product is good at those things that matter to its user community, a good product manager greatly increases the chances that a product will be a hit with its userbase, encouraging popularity and customer loyalty
2. Increasing revenue, as a result of increased product popularity and reduced churn
3. Reducing time to market and development cost
   • By building consensus amongst all stakeholders in a business about what the product is, what features it should include, and how it should work
   • By providing the development team with an unambiguous specification to build to
   • By providing the development team with an ongoing resource that enables them to understand the customer perspective
4. Increasing profit, as a result of increased revenue and reduced cost
5. Providing strategic insight
   • Product managers have a unique perspective. Because a good product manager understands the commercial situation in which a product operates and can see (through exposure to users) how user requriements are changing, they are well placed to spot mid-to-long term strategic opportunities for companies, and to develop their products to capitalise on those opportunities

A hybrid mind

Good product managers have a unique combination of commercial and technical knowledge – it is therefore perhaps not surprising that there is a shortage of them! But that combination of skills is key if a product manager is going to provide the vision, leadership and support required by all the stakeholders around a product – external stakeholders (customers) as well as internal company ones.

In the next of our series of posts on this topic, we will look at how companies getting into digital tend outsource development and neglect the product manager, and which problems they typically encounter as a result.

Keplar provides product management capabilities to businesses looking to build and develop new digital products. Send us an email to find out how Keplar can help your business.