Product management is a discipline responsible for overseeing the development, launch, and improvement of successful products. In its process, a product manager combines a deep understanding of user needs with a robust business strategy.
With a focus on planning, development, and product marketing, product management becomes a key element in achieving sustainable business success. Gain further insights into the definition and process of product management in the following article.
What is Product Management?
Product Management is a function within an organization closely related to a product, encompassing stages of planning, development, and preparing the product for the market. This function aims to maximize the business value generated by the product.
Teams involved in Product Management regularly design better-performing products as customer needs increase, requiring a profound understanding to create solutions that align with these needs. This is where the role of Product Management becomes crucial.
Universal guidelines for the Product Management process do not exist because each product has unique goals and challenges. However, basic steps in most companies are generally similar, although the naming and process details may differ between them.
Product Management Process
Here are several common processes found in Product Management:
- Idea Management
New ideas can be discovered through various methods such as brainstorming, research, user interviews, and more. It is crucial to manage these methods in a structured and focused way to select relevant ideas.
The responsibility of Product Management is to collect, combine, and store these ideas. At this stage, various ideas come from stakeholders, users, and investors. A Product Manager’s task is to maintain strong relationships with these parties to ensure that the ideas are reviewed before implementation.
- Specification
After ideas are collected and managed, it’s important to gain a deep understanding of the details of these ideas. This helps provide an overview of the scope and implementation of the ideas.
The specification process doesn’t have to be overly technical, but it’s important to have concise documents that answer key questions such as: What will be created and why? What should this new product achieve? How will we measure the success of this product?
Product Management must answer these questions, considering input from various stakeholders and different perspectives, ensuring agreement among parties.
- Roadmapping
Before prioritizing ideas, a roadmap should be created. The goal is to minimize debates about features or products and focus more on long-term strategy and vision.
Roadmapping will influence KPI goals and business strategies. The product team needs to identify products with significant impact and the best return on investment (ROI) for the company.
- Priority Setting
The next step is to set priorities. At this stage, the most feasible ideas for implementation are selected, while irrelevant ones are discarded.
In setting priorities, Product Management needs to choose suitable strategies and priority frameworks, such as using a product tree or a scrolling model. Regardless of the technique used, Product Management must balance the needs of stakeholders with the products to be created. A Product Manager must launch production within a specified timeframe.
- Delivery
After setting priorities, the creation and delivery of the product can begin. The product delivery stage may vary in each company. A common approach before delivery is to create a detailed project plan and deliver the product after ensuring it functions well and passes testing.
At this stage, Product Management is responsible for ensuring that the created product meets the requirements, market expectations, and stakeholders. It is necessary to define, clarify, and validate that the product can achieve the company’s goals.
- Analysis and Experimentation
After the product is released to the market, Product Managers can analyze using various collected data. With available data, cause-and-effect relationships and correlations can be drawn.
At this stage, Product Management can take important actions, such as examining behaviors that drive key company metrics. For example, if conversion becomes a key performance indicator (KPI), Product Managers can look at the actions users take before deciding to purchase the product.
Product analysis also allows the product team to conduct experiments. The team can test various scenarios on different user segments with the goal of measuring effectiveness.
With accurate analysis and regular experimentation, products can endure and experience improvement over a longer period.
- Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is an interesting and challenging stage. At this stage, suggestions, insights, and criticism from users are obtained. Product Managers can use this feedback to make improvements or enhancements to the product.
There are various ways to collect customer feedback, such as providing customer service features in the application, conducting surveys, interviewing customers, and more. Additionally, it is important to seek feedback from former customers to analyze why they left or stopped using the product.
Overall, Product Management is a discipline that plays a crucial role in the development, management, and improvement of successful products. Through steps such as idea management, specification, priority setting, and delivery, Product Management ensures that products achieve business goals and meet user needs.
With continuous analysis and experimentation, as well as feedback from customers, Product Management also strives to continuously improve products to remain relevant and of high quality.
