Product Management Playground is part of Digiofit Oy Playbook of Product Management concept. Product Management Playground is a framework that helps to understand, structure and with that develop Product Management function. Framework helps to discussion and align the purpose and role of the product management within the organization. The structure was created by combining almost two decades of experience from wide range of product management duties with product management theory.
Product Management function interacts with company management, research & development, marketing, and sales. Product Managers also need to work closely with the customers in order to truly understand customer needs to come up with so-called product-market fi. Product Management translates company level strategies into concrete actionable development items and package the development outcome to something that can be easily delivered and sold to customers. Below figure presents the Product Management main tasks and stakeholders.
From Company strategy into features
Company level strategy often consists of items like mission, vision, capability analysis, financial targets and -framework. Company level strategy defines the area where company operates and where is aims to excel over the competition. It should also define what are the corner stones of the competitive advantage and also where not to focus (so called strategic choices).
Product vision then translates the translates the company strategy into more concrete product level vision (or strategy) that serves the company strategy. This includes items such as product and technology vision, market opportunity analysis (if not already done in company level), capability analysis and competitor analysis.
Roadmapping and priorization is the phase when strategy “comes into live”. This consist of understanding the concrete customer needs and translating them into concrete features and solutions that can be developed.
From development outcome into a sellable package
Productization contains creation of sales models, pricing structures and prices for the delivered product or solution. It also consists of concrete day to day portfolio management in terms of active life-cycle management. It it is also important to collect and follow key performance indicators in order to provide facts for the feature, roadmap and strategy decisions.
Product Management is in key role to help marketing to promote the product/solution with right arguments and on the other hand to help sales to sell the product/solution effectively. Important is to be able highlight the value promise key differentiators compared to the competition. Product/solution also needs to be packaged constructed in a way that is easily sellable to the target customers. High level product descriptions are often the concrete deliverables.
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Timo Siponen