Product Management: To Be...Or Not To Be!!

Many underestimate or simply do not understand the role of product management. Essentially, the role of product management is to define, develop and maintain products and services to: (1) provide more value than the competition, (2) create a competitive advantage over the competition and (3) deliver financial benefit to a business.


The most effective product managers spend time understanding what consumers want AND need, then create solutions through products and services to satisfy them. To do this, product managers focus on the "why" and the "how" of the adverbs. This issue and subsequent solution can determine the product's success or failure.


Creative minds, such as Apple and Wal-mart use product placement and brand integration synonymously. They use brand integration and strategic product placement to make consumers feel as if their product is a necessity in their lives. Each of these companies is aware that the art of product management is to combine a deep understanding of your target customer’s needs and desires with the capabilities of your business and the technologies they have to work with in order to come up with a product definition that is both compelling and achievable. The process of coming up with the right product/right time boils down to insight, judgment, and the ability to make choices. Of the hundreds of possible and even desirable features in the product, which are the few that are actually essential to the success of the product?


When speaking with Gary Guidry, President of I'm Ready Productions, he described product placement as one of the most integral components of business. I'm Ready Productions releases their stage play DVDs to audiences worldwide. In order to ensure that their product is appropriately managed, he has created seven key considerations in product management:

• Know your products and their limits
• Listen First - ask what they do before you explain what you do
• Ask why, not what
• Be decisive - make calls, don't wait forever
• Responsive - get back to people, period
• Communicate frequently, concretely, and concisely
• Manage Passion

An example of how to do things correctly comes from the Ford motor company’s product managers. They wanted to offer their extended warranty product to their F-150 pickup truck customers; however, their impersonal approach in which they simply used the customer’s name just wasn’t doing the trick: they had a 2.5% response rate.

Determined to make their customer contact more personal, the Ford product managers went back to the company’s databases and pulled together all of the information that they could on the people who had bought their F-150 truck. This included things such as vehicle type, how long they had owned it, address, age, income and gender.

Using this type of information they were able to personalize how they interacted with each customer. This went so far as being able to send them material that contained a picture of a correct gender person standing in front of the correct model F-150 which was painted the same color as the customer’s.

By doing this, Ford saw a 5.7% increase in their response rates and a whopping 35.7% increase in their sales penetration. Not bad results for what was basically some behind-the-scenes database work.

In most cases, product management is more important than the product itself!!

Ford F-150: The Prime Example of Product Management