The Product Manager (PM) is one of the most important jobs in your business. This person defines your product or service, and hence they are responsible for the success or failure of both it and potentially your entire business. There will be lots of other factors at play that will determine if you are ultimately successful – people, money, market, quality, luck – but if the PM fucks it up, you’re dead before you start.
If you’re in true start-up mode, then you, as CEO, may be the PM as well as occupying every other role in the company. But you still need to know what you’re doing. The good thing is that although there seems to be a lot of mystic about what product managers do, there can be a highly structured approach to the discipline. It's called Lifecycle Management.
I’m going to describe a process that gets you through a complete product lifecycle, from ideas, through creation, launching, selling and then retiring and killing your product. It’s called the 5Ds, and they are the PM's job – all of them.
The 5Ds describe your product's lifecycle – like a baby that’s conceived, then born, grows from a needy, squealing blob of poo in adulthood, then lives their adult life, ages and dies.
But before all this starts, the tool the Product Manager should have is the Product Plan (or Product Roadmap) - the bible that shows what products/services/improvements and extensions will be launched and when. And, just as important, what those products and services will replace.
Definition – this is where your product or service is created, from the initial concept ideas, to validating those ideas, developing competitive strategies, through to the design. You’ll look at pricing strategies, cost targets and estimate how much gross profit you’re going to make. Your product is fully described in a Product Description.
Development – here you develop or source your product, validate its performance, pilot it, market test it.
Delivery – you head to the delivery suite and launch it. Start selling it to real customers and get real market feedback.
Daily Life – you’ll be through the initial launch and into regular orders. You’ll forecast orders coming in and, for a physical product, be providing your source with manufacturing requirements. You’ll be dealing with customer questions and issues. There will also be the constant improvement of the product or service with cost, quality and performance improvements. If the product is part of a series then your development team may start platforming what they've developed - with considerations on NRE and reuse.
Death – here you’ll be first retiring and then killing your product. You’ll be forecasting the end of life, and the replacement with something better/cheaper/faster. Don’t be surprised if when you announce end of life, the demand goes up – use it as a tool.
There is a structured approach to managing each of these phases – click on the heading to go through each of them.
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