The Product Management & Marketing (PM&M) profession presents significant challenges to its practitioners. The main challenge of our profession is: making good product decisions in an environment of uncertainty to drive long term sales, profitability and competitive positioning.
There are many methods and best practices that one can learn and use in the challenging world of PM&M, in order to to help. Occasionally there might be some fortunate PM&Ms facing projects where all the parameters are available, obvious and accurate, for most of us most of the time this is not the case.
Once we are over the decision making challenge, we have to face the organization and manage the “internal marketing” of the decisions within the various functions in the company. The PM&M has to coordinate and collaborate with almost all internal organizations – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Delivery, Support, Legal and R&D. To be able to do all this cooperation the PM&M has to build matrix management skills, but more than this relay on excellent human relationship capabilities.
Finally… after we have managed to make the decision and get buy in within the company, then we reach the critical stage (& our original objective) – going to the market and meeting our customers. In my view, the PM&M must face the customers. This is the way to “feel” and learn the market, find out what the customers are looking for, what are the advantages and disadvantages for our product and how to make it a winner with clear differentiation. Close engagement with the customers is essential to enable the right decision making. However, meeting customers successfully isn’t always an easy task, and the PM&M needs to have the human and technical capabilities to interact with the customers, to present the product and to face the challenges the customers present.
The Customer is King – But are they Always Right?
The customer is the king – they buy our product. We also know that the customer is always right. However, sadly they are not always right or at least not completely right; especially if (fortunately) there are many different customers with different needs. After we have engaged with the customer we will often be left with a conflict – do we meet the customer’s requirements or do we take them into account yet specify other product goals? Generally we are time limited and resource restricted and so our decisions will be (to a large extent) between mutually exclusive options.
As in many situations in life, there is the “easy way out”. When making decisions the PM&M can rely on what the customers demand. It will make everybody happy; internally in the organization no one can argue with the logic of satisfying the requirements coming from customers and the sales people will be delighted to go to the customers and tell them that all their requests are fulfilled. The customers will be delighted to get their exact requirements and to have their views influence the product. But, the “easy way” is not necessarily the “right way”, the popular decision will give the PM&M a friendlier environment in the short run, but will it be justified by the business performance in the long run? Did we sacrifice the future of the product for the comfort of making easy decisions? One of the classic PM&M dilemmas or minefields is letting one or a few key customers dictate the product design. Our responsibility is to make the best product decision in an environment of uncertainty and we need our customers to buy our product, but, we also need to ensure that one or two key accounts do not set the product back in terms of its wider market acceptability.
The PM&M is usually at the eye of the storm. The customers have their requests and crisis, the sales people demand that we satisfy our customers and also give the sales people some new exciting things to sell and to meet their quotas, the operations and support are complaining on the product capabilities and R&D is always short on resources. There are methods and tools that help sort things out in this chaos, but often there are no easy or even obviously right answers. The “craft of PM&M” is to be able to observe the surroundings, analyze the conflicting information, to assess the situation and in the end make the right product decisions that will maximize long term sales, profitability and competitive positioning.
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