Best product management practices for a successful digital business

Product management has become a core function of digital businesses. It encompasses a broad set of activities that include developing a strategic roadmap, marketing, negotiating and then delivering the first version of the minimum viable product using agile methodologies.

A good product management program creates a sustainable approach for your organization as it collaborates closely with sales by ensuring that they are not pursuing the wrong customers.

In order to get the most out of your product management function, follow these practices in way that is most suitable to your digital business:

1.   Select a Strong Product Manager

Before implementing any kind of product management practices, CIOs and IT leaders must understand the necessity of finding the right product manager. Product managers are crucial to the success of a digital business as they orchestrate stakeholders and teams to deliver a better product and enhanced financial outcomes. Also, they build the business case and work with the team to deliver the product or service that best achieves financial and other goals.

A product manager must have a unique mix of skills, excelling at time management, juggling multiple priorities, leading through influence, and collaborating with delivery teams to achieve concrete results. A product manager needs to work at a faster delivery cadence, deal with much more rapid change and use effective data-driven techniques to guide teams' choices.

2.   Create a Strategy

The product manager must create a strategy that determines the kind of product to be launched, its attributes and features. Take an example of a shoe; the product management team must determine the size, width, arch type of that shoe to be launched by the company. A product manager must be able to define in detail who the main customer for the product is, in which geography it is to be marketed, and what the price range of the product can be. For example, a shoe can be targeted for athletes, a gym-going audience or college students. While creating a strategy, a product manager must focus on determining the development lifecycle of the product, entry and exit criteria, marketing and pricing strategy. A product’s strategy must be created in a manner that is in line with the business and organizational strategy. The product strategy must prove beneficial to the organization with ROI, increased profit and customer satisfaction.

3.   Prepare a Roadmap for Product Management

After creating the strategy, a product manager must prepare a product roadmap that acts as the blueprint of the successive releases planned for the product with associated timelines. While preparing a roadmap, the set of product requirements can be split and assigned to specific releases. Also, target dates should be allotted for respective releases. Each version of the product has a specific feature at a time. Thus, in a product roadmap, multiple versions of the product are planned to have a specific feature set. A team of certain members is created to work on each of these versions. Take a look at the table given below that demonstrates how multiple versions could be released.

Version Release Table

Develop a prototype

A product manager must oversee prototyping to mitigate the risks associated with product development. Making use of this methodology early in the product management process helps in assessing the technical feasibility in the user environment. Software prototype development consist of several Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools are available in the market such as Microsoft Visual Studio, JBoss, etc. Prototyping provides the organization with guaranteed technical and economic feasibility of product with low risks. Physical prototyping involves creating array of products using actual materials and resources.

Usually, prototypes are distinguished into two types:

• Evolutionary prototypes

In evolutionary prototype development, critical product requirements are selected and implemented. Once these critical requirements are implemented, the product management team can keep adding more requirements on an incremental basis periodically and finally this prototype becomes fully functional.

• Throwaway prototypes

In a throwaway prototype, products are developed using critical requirements. But, once the proof of concept is established, these prototypes are thrown away and not used any more.

Product managers today stand in a unique position as they can make or break the digital business initiative. In order to succeed, a product manager requires full engagement and support of business leaders and CIOs. Following these best practices gets your organization one step closer to achieving a successful digital business.