Product management and its principles.

1. Product Management &
its principles

2. Product Management
 Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company
dealing with the planning, forecasting, or marketing of a product or products at
all stages of the product lifecycle.
 There isn’t a single definition for product management however, product
management is simply a way to organize the planning, production, marketing
and other tasks related to the creation and distribution of a product. It involves
the coordination of teams, data, processes, business systems and more.

3. Functions of product management:
The main function of product management is to develop the product.
 Idea Generation
 Product features enhancement
 Improve current complaint issues from customer
 Coordination with finance and legal teams to improve the product quality.

4. What is a Product?
 A product is anything that can offered to market for attention, acquisition, use, consumption
that might satisfy a want or need.
 Product includes more than tangible goods.
 Broadly defined, products include physical objects, services events, persons, places organization,
ideas or mix with these entities.

5. Features of a product:
Tangibility
Intangible
Attributes
Customer
satisfaction
Exchange
values
Associated
attributes

6. Levels of product:
• According to Philip Kotler, who is an
economist and a marketing guru, a product is
more than a tangible ‘thing’.
• A product meets the needs of a consumer and
in addition to a tangible value this product also
has an abstract value.
• For this reason Kotler states that there are five
product levels that can be identified and
developed.

7. 1. Core Benefit
 The core benefit is the fundamental need or wants that the customer satisfies when they buy the product.
 For example: The core benefit of Coca-Cola is to quench a thirst.
2. Generic Product
 The generic product is a basic version of the product made up of only those features necessary for it to
function.
 For example: The generic product is a burnt vanilla smelling, black, carbonated, and sweetened fizzy drink.

8. 3. Expected Product
 The expected product is the set of features that the customers expect when they buy the product.
 For example: The expected product is that the customer’s Coca-Cola is cold. If this isn’t the case then
expectations won’t be met and the drink will not taste its best in the mind of the customer.
4. Augmented Product
 The augmented product refers to any product variations, extra features, or services that help
differentiate the product from its competitors
 For example: Coca-Cola’s augmented product is that it offers Diet-Coke. How does Coca-Cola exceed
customers expectations with this product? By offering all the great taste of Coca-Cola, but with zero
calories.

9. 5. Potential Product
 The potential product includes all augmentations and transformations the product might undergo
in the future. In simple language, this means that to continue to surprise and delight customers the
product must be augmented.
 For example: One way in which Coca-Cola delights customers is by running competitions. The
prizes in these competitions are often things that, “money can’t buy”, such as celebrity experiences.
To continue to delight customers over time the competition prizes change frequently.

10. Product (Characteristics)

11. I. Product which is more acceptable to a
customers:
 We cannot sell grass to a lion.
 Product should have some tangible and non tangible benefits.
 Customers cannot be asked to change himself for a product.
 Many products fail because they are not acceptable to them.

12. II. Affordable product
 It is a very important factor.
 Price can be high if the customer believe that he is not paying more.
 Price =Perceived benefit + Actual price

13. III. Available nearest to customer

14. IV. Awareness among customer:
 Building awareness among industry personnel, grocery workers, retail outlets are key activities
for any marketing personnel.
 Brand recall normally among many “Me-too” products is tough.
 New activities like event management ,direct to customer advertising/promoting etc. are
extensively used abroad.
 Study reveal that brand recall will be better specially where degree of competition is high.

15. V. Relevance to customer:
 This become very important
 Concept of unique selling point is replaced by unique customer perception(UCP).
 We find many FMCG companies finding ways to make the product more relevant to consumer
ex. New H&S shampoo with mustard oil for better hair nourishment.

16. VI. Response generation through
promotion:
 Advertisements should generate sales not awards.
 Any money spent should generate adequate returns and response.
 FMCG sector spent most of their marketing budget on promotion.
 The trend is slowly shifting from conventional promotion to event management ,
direct to customer and relationship marketing.

17. Product manager
 A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business
objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and
rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.

18. Skills of a Product Manager

19. Responsibilities
 Product Planning
 Analysis of market
 Customer
 Competitors
 External Environment
 Deciding objectives & strategies
 Coordination with other departments

20. Limitations for a Product Manager
 Limited resources to work on new ideas
 Inability to “stick” with the project scope
 Access and availability of technology for existing as well as new product
 Inability to fully align the project objectives with the
 business/organizational strategy
 Inability to manage projects with unspecified budget and/or schedule:
 Dependence on functional management
 Following an exclusive methodology Project

21. Challenges faced by a Product Manager:
 Gaining acceptance of ideas
 Legal restrictions
 State of market
 Consumers readiness for product
 Changing govt. policies
 Process
 Unstructured Data
 Communication
 Lack of Visibility and Authority

23. Product Life Cycle And Its Stages
Product life cycle is a business analysis that attempts
to identify a set of common stages in the life of
commercial products, for example introduction,
promotion, growth, maturity and decline.

24. Stages of PLC
INTRODUCTION
 The establishment stage is characterized by low growth rate of sales as the product
is newly launched in the market.
1. Product Branding and Quality level established.
2. Pricing may be low or high to recover development cost.
3. Distribution is selective until customer show acceptance.
4. Promotion is aimed at innovators.

25. GROWTH
 Firm seeks to build brand preference.
 Increase market share.
1. Product Quality maintained and additional features are supported.
2. Pricing is maintained as increase demand with little competition.
3. Distribution channels are added as demand increases, customer accept the
product.
4. Promotion is aimed at broader audience.

26. MATURITY
 Strong growth in sales diminishes.
 Competition may appear with similar products.
 Primary object is to defend market share while max. profit.
1. Product feature enhanced to differentiate.
2. Pricing may be lower.
3. Distribution becomes more intensive and
4. incentives.
5. Promotion Emphasizes.

27. DECLINE
 Sales Decline as a regular same product with time.
1. Maintain the product, possible make it new by adding new feature
2. Reduce cost and continuous to offer it.
3. Selling to another firm that is willing to continue the product

28. Product Management
Principles

29. 1. Start With Why
 The first principle, “Start With Why” means that before getting into the details of
“what” should be done and “how” it should be done, the discussion should revolve
around the “why”: What is the higher-order purpose of our work? What are we trying
to achieve? What is our vision for the future?
 Starting with “why” is possible at all levels.
 Clearly, one of the key responsibilities of company and product leaders is setting the
direction for the product, which includes the aspirational vision as the basis for product
strategy and roadmap.
 Ensuring that vision is broadly evangelized and embraced by the team as their reason
for being is crucial, then, for the leadership of a “missionary” organization.

30.  Whether you are a product leader, a product manager, or even just an individual product team
member, you can follow the principle of starting with why by continually making the connections
between the day to day work and the bigger vision.

31. 2. Understand the Problem
 The second product management principle is to truly, deeply understand the problem you are solving.
At first glance, this principle sounds obvious, even trivial. How would you solve a problem you don’t
understand?
 In practice, though, very often we end up chasing feature ideas without taking the time to truly
understand the problem this would solve, who of our current and prospective customers actually has
this problem, and whether they care enough about this problem to pay for a solution.
 Following this principle therefore first and foremost requires the crucial product management skill
of empathy, which means being able to put yourself in others’ shoes and see things from their
perspective. If you don’t understand how your customers perceive the world, it’s very hard to attempt to
solve problems for them.
 Truly understanding the problem therefore requires looking at the problem from different perspectives,
which requires diversity of thought in the product team.

32.  Understanding the problem also means defining the problem before attempting to solve it.
However, it also means understanding that especially in technology-enabled products, problem
and solution are often interdependent.
 Following this principle also means focusing on people problems before product problems. Too
often, product managers see their world primarily through product objectives: “we need to
improve retention, therefore we should build feature XYZ”.
 It’s important that the balance is right. In order for you to extract value for the business, it has to
first be created for your customers, which requires solving their problems. So understand and
solve customer problems first, and then focus on extracting value for your business.

33. 3. Focus Relentlessly
 When you have started with the “why” and truly understood the problem that you are trying to solve,
it is time to focus relentlessly. Focusing relentlessly means doing fewer things than you think you
should be doing, but taking them to perfection.
 Focusing relentlessly means understanding that a great product isn’t one that does a lot of things in a
way that’s just good enough. A great product means really nailing a few things. It means doing fewer
things better.
 Focusing relentlessly thus means that you can’t prioritize work on your product by following a
framework because these frameworks disregard the fundamental uncertainties underlying innovative
product development. More importantly, though, these frameworks would never tell you to focus on
the differentiating features that are harder to build.

34.  Instead of following frameworks, you need to prioritize based on vision, strategy, and a deep
understanding of your customer and their problems.
 The principle of relentless focus means that an 80:20 approach can be misguided in product
development. The 80:20 approach means finding the 80 percent of the value that can be
achieved with 20 percent of the effort, and then only delivering on those 80 percent.
 The truth is, however, that differentiation is often achieved through those last 20 percent,
precisely because they are more effort. If the remaining 20 percent of value were easy to
deliver, everyone would do it. By going the proverbial extra mile, your product becomes more
attractive to those customers who value the remaining 20 percent in a way that is expensive to
copy.

35. 4. Empower the Team
 The forth product management principle is to empower the team to solve the customer problems
(in ways that serve the business) through cross-functional collaboration between all the disciplines
involved in product development (at least product management, design, and engineering).
 Empowered teams have many benefits in terms of motivation, customer centricity, velocity, and
capacity to innovate. They are more motivated because they have higher autonomy and sense of
purpose. They are more customer centric because they can learn the best solutions in close contact
with the customer, not based on senior management decisions. They have higher velocity because
feedback loops are inside the team and don’t have to go up and down the management chain. They
have higher capacity to innovate because of the cross-functional nature, in which understanding of
the user, technology, and the business comes together.

36. 5. Embrace Uncertainty
 Empowering the product team is particularly important because it allows following the fifth principle
to embrace uncertainty. Product development is a fundamentally risky endeavor. That risk doesn’t just
lie in how well the ideas you have can be executed. It is far more fundamental than that: regardless of
your initial confidence in product ideas, most of them won’t deliver the hypothesized value (to the
customer, to the business) you hoped for. Moreover, you won’t be able to identify the bad ideas until
you have invested substantial effort in exploring them. That is the uncertainty axiom of product
management.
 Embracing this uncertainty means accepting failure, recognizing that some of the ideas that sound great
in theory will fail to deliver any real value.
 It also means that you sometimes may have streaks of bad ideas, where idea after idea fails. Accepting
this can be hard. No one likes to fail all the time.
 It is therefore important to understand this as a fundamental property of product development and
nothing to be ashamed of. To the contrary: every idea that didn’t turn out to deliver the hypothesized
value should be understood as a learning opportunity.

37.  Following the principle therefore means validating all ideas. It means that no idea, even ones that
come from senior stakeholders or customers, are sacrosanct — everything needs to prove that it’s
really making a difference.
 This validation needs to happen as early as possible — shipping something and then realizing it
doesn’t deliver the hypothesized value means a colossal waste of resources.
 When evaluating validation practices to apply, it’s important to understand that the only signal you
can really trust is people “voting with their feet and wallets”. Just asking someone whether they have
a certain problem or would like a better solution is very likely to result in an affirmative answer.
Words are cheap.
 If you really want to understand if the problem is big enough or your solution works for the
customer, you have to get them to put their time and/or money on the line — start using your
solution or even better, paying for it. That can be in the form of a prototype or Minimum Viable
Product (MVP), but just words without action should never be understand as strong evidence to
validate an idea.

38. 6. Balance Inputs, Outputs, Outcomes, and
Learning
 Following from the previous one, the next important principle is to balance inputs, outputs,
outcomes, and learning.
 Modern approaches focus on outcomes (for customers and for the business) is important. Even a
singular focus on outcomes, however, has its challenges. Instead, you need to also consider inputs (the
quality of information you use to make product decisions and the decision process) as well as learning
(how you feed information from the outcomes you have achieved back into the product development
process).
 As with team empowerment, you can only fully follow this principle with senior management support. If
teams are measured by outputs, then it is hard for a team to focus on the other aspects.
 However, making sure that outcomes, inputs, and learning are not completely disregarded is something
that even individual team members can pay attention to.

39.  Another important way that this principle can be implemented even within the scope of individual teams is
in terms of ensuring enough emphasis is put on the learning feedback loop.
 The challenge with learning, distilling findings from the outcomes that were achieved, and feeding them
back into the process is that it requires work today that will pay off only in the distant future or even
benefit different people (when the current members of the product team have long left).
 However, in the interest of the longer term success of the product, it is important that lessons learned are
collected, documented, and shared in some form or another.

40. 7. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
 This principle includes not only iterative delivery of software through Scrum or other agile software delivery
practices, but the entire process of discovering, delivering, and improving the product.
 This starts with product discovery and the misunderstood MVP. Many people believe that the MVP should be
the first version you ship of a new product or feature, scoped as small as possible so you can still validate or
invalidate the core value hypothesis.
 A better way to understand the concept of the MVP is that it is a tool to validate the currently riskiest
hypothesis or assumption.
 This means two things: firstly, an MVP doesn’t need to be a product. In fact, often, it won’t be: a prototype or
proof of concept is frequently cheaper to produce and validate than a full, scalable product.
 Secondly, once the riskiest assumption is validated, another assumption becomes the riskiest. This means you
can now iterate and produce another MVP to validate that next hypothesis, until the remaining assumptions
bear little enough risk that you’re confident building a real product.

41.  Iterative delivery is almost a given these days with plenty of iterative software development
practices. One particularly important aspect I have already covered above: make sure the entire
team including engineers gets involved not just during delivery, but also in the discovery
iterations. That way you can ensure there is no hard “hand-over” between discovery and delivery,
which would make the iterative process a much more linear waterfall process.