Technology companies are focussing on building cross-functional product teams led by a product manager. A product manager is responsible for driving out the vision, strategy, design and execution of the product. It is not one person doing it on their own, but a product team who have the skills needed to deliver the product. This team typically includes engineering, user experience, marketing, legal, quality assurance and security.
Some of the key trends we see developing in product management are:
In the last decade, product teams have focussed on product delivery. Product delivery involves all the activities involved in delivering value to our customers i.e. writing code, packaging releases and deploying. Release cycles have become faster, teams have adopted agile practices, and we have seen the emergence of DevOps. Product delivery is all about delivering value as fast as possible.
Product discovery, on the other hand, involves all the activities involved in deciding what to build. It involves activities like conducting customer interviews, rapid prototyping, running experiments, building Minimum Viable Products (MVP). The goal of product discovery is to learn fast, and the aim is to learn fast before building and shipping the product.
Companies are beginning to embrace product discovery practices but it is still its infancy.
Companies understand the importance of innovation and many have built dedicated innovation labs or have separate dedicated innovation teams which are a huge investment. Despite having dedicated teams to innovate, it has proved challenging to release successful products and success rates remain low. Teams fail to launch products with sustainable business models despite adopting the latest practices like design thinking and lean startup.
It is key to understand that teams in innovation labs have an early stage idea and are in search of a repeatable and scalable business model. This is not the same as working on existing products where the business model is known. Teams searching for a business model have a set of untested hypotheses about the customers, market, pricing channels etc, in this case, the focus should be to validate the hypotheses as fast as possible.
It is important to define different processes for teams working on products where the business model is unknown. In most companies, there is no framework for managing innovation and also no clear method to measure and track innovation.
A number of frameworks that have been developed in recent years and we will be seeing organizations implement these to improve success rates of innovation teams.
Product teams, especially those that have adopted agile practices are often featured chasing with very little or no direction on what they are trying to accomplish in the longer term. One of the fundamentals of product management is that you can’t build a product for everyone. It will end up being bloated and hard to maintain a product that is useful for no-one. It is important to focus on a group of people or a segment of the market who genuinely care about the problem you are solving.
Organisations are realising that creating successful product starts with a good solid product strategy. Product strategy describes who the product is for, why people would want to buy and use the product and its value proposition. The value proposition describes why the product is better compared to existing alternatives.
In order for product teams to make sound product decisions, they must understand the bigger context. This is what product strategy enables them to do. It also enables the various divisions in an organisation to align towards the bigger goal.
In summary, we are seeing some exciting trends like product discovery, innovation frameworks and well-defined product strategies shaping the future of product management. Product management is a field that is rich with opportunities to learn and it is exciting to see the future focussing on the strategic role of product management.
