The impacts of software product management

Product management has evolved to encompass numerous roles and responsibilities. Leaders looking to hire a product professional must consider what skills and knowledge their business needs demand. Startups and small businesses need the right product people in place, but titles can be confusing. In recent years, the explosion of software-based products and the growing popularity of Agile methodologies have dramatically transformed the field of product management, which now includes a number of roles and specializations.

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The impacts of software product management

Content:

• Product research tools: a guide for product teams
• Top Product Management Trends in 2022
• Digital Transformation and Its Impact on New-Product Management for Manufacturers
• What is Data Product Management?
• The Impact Strong Product Management Has Across Your Organization
• Product Management
• What is the role of a product manager?
• Software Product Management

Product research tools: a guide for product teams

Filed Under. History of product management. Product manager: the role and responsibilities. Key skills of effective product managers. Key responsibilities of effective product managers.

Product managers: B2B vs. Product management tools. Agile product management. Find the best product management tool for your team. What is exactly is product management? Developing new products is one of the most exciting undertakings at any company. It involves creative and strategic thinking, clear communication, and quick execution. As an activity, product management brings together many experts and stakeholders across a product life cycle.

It requires extreme attention to detail, cross-team coordination, and intense organization. The best product managers are technical enough to talk shop with engineers, and have the management skills to lead large cross-functional projects. What do product managers actually do? In this guide to product management, we'll cover the following essential definitions and concepts:.

What is product management? The history of product management. The roles and responsibilities of product managers.

The product management lifecycle. Common product management tools. Product management is the organizational process that drives all activity related to creating, launching, and continuously supporting a product. Product management can look different at every company.

The ultimate goal of a product management team, no matter the size, is to identify, plan, develop, launch , and support a viable product that solves a specific customer need. To that end, product management is also very much about relationship management. Product management is a relatively new organizational function. Many activities that now fall under product management would have, in the past, been handled by other departments such as executive leadership, marketing, UX, design, or development.

Neil H. Product management has, of course, come a long way since. Marketing and product are usually now functionally split in the following ways:. Quicken is now one of the most successful modern business case studies, rolling out at-home finance products for non-financial users and becoming one of the largest mortgage lenders in America. Cook attributes this success to keeping his product and product teams closely aligned with customer needs. What makes a product manager's impact unique is that they influence every aspect of the product path, from setting goals to defining success, gaining internal alignment, rallying team members, and owning eventual outcomes.

Product managers are often seen as leaders inside an organization: A product manager's priorities may vary by company, but these are the main responsibilities:. Research: This is often focused on target market, user personas, competitors, and market conditions. Strategy : A high-level product plan frequently includes goals and objectives, product requirements, design briefs, and a rough timeline.

Communication : Product managers always communicate with others about their plans and product roadmap , and they must present it to stakeholders. Stakeholders include executive leadership, investors, development teams, designers, and others. They also manage communication flow across groups. Product development coordination : Once initial product plans and the product roadmap are approved, product managers work in lockstep with development and design teams to ensure that product development moves forward as planned.

Data analysis : After developing, testing, and launching the product, product managers gather user feedback, product performance metrics and market reception as data for analysis. They use these data-based findings to help steer future iterations of a product. Roles closely related to a product manager:. Company executives. Product owners. Project managers. UX designers. UX researchers. Product marketers. Product managers act as the bridge between an organization's technology, UX and business needs, balancing all three.

At most organizations—from early-stage start-ups to established enterprises—effective product managers have these key skills:. Communication in speech and writing. Strategic thinking. Relationship management. Data analysis.

Technical aptitude. Some product managers may be stronger in one or more areas, but the best have at least some proficiency in all. Let's take a closer look at a product manager's responsibilities from a few more angles—starting with inbound product management activities vs.

Inbound product management. Inbound product management is all about ensuring a solution solves an identified problem. Basically, a product manager must make a clear case that a problem exists, and that a product or tweak to a product will solve it. They also must make sure all stakeholders are fully aligned around the plan of action. Inbound activities usually involve user experience , design, and the development process. Outbound product management. Outbound product management is more about keeping a pulse on the market and understanding how your product compares to the competition, or how customers are responding to your product.

Outbound activities involve keeping an open feedback loop with customers throughout the product life cycle , especially post-launch. Product managers in this area work closely with product marketers or other members of marketing and sales teams.

Key responsibilities of product managers. Here's an overview of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities from both an inbound and outbound perspective:. Monitoring the market. Running competitive analysis. Conducting customer interviews and user testing.

Defining the product vision, prioritizing features, and roadmap planning. Aligning stakeholders around their product vision. Defining and translating technical requirements. Creating processes and documentation for clear communication. Allocating resources across teams and product development. Pricing and revenue modeling. Defining goals and tracking success metrics. A product manager's approach can depend on whether their product is B2B business to business or B2C business to consumer.

B2B products are sold to businesses—generally software, services, or raw materials—while B2C products are sold to individual consumers. Here are the main differentiators between a B2B product manager and a B2C product manager:. Sales and customer acquisition : Because businesses are the buyer for B2B products, B2B product managers must be familiar with the long sales cycles and the product-related collateral marketing and sales teams will need.

B2C product managers, on the other hand, may look to drive shorter sales cycles and faster-converting collateral. Post-sale customer support : Because B2B products often require hands-on onboarding and post-sales support, B2B product managers will have a deep understanding of after-sale customer interaction and relationship-building.

Meanwhile, B2C product managers' experience with customer support is more transactional, so they're likely to focus on quickly routing and solving immediate customer needs. Product roadmap : Both B2B and B2C product managers will need to balance customer retention and new customer acquisition when they think about new features.

Because the impact of losing a customer for a B2B product is much higher than for a B2C product, the product manager must account for this in their product roadmap.

In each stage of the life cycle, a good product management tool can help you stay organized and see insights into:. Market research. User stories and feedback. Product strategy and road mapping. Design and wireframing.

User experience testing. Product and task management. Product launch event planning. The right product management tools allow for easy cross-team collaboration, make your whole team more productive, and can even serve as your project and task management system.

Top Product Management Trends in 2022

For the manufacturer undertaking new-product development, Digital Transformation means smart new products with embedded software. Digital products in turn require software and hardware development teams to work together — a hybrid project — which ultimately leads to combining software development methods with the more traditional gating process that manufacturers use. The result is a new more agile gating approach to product development. Some leading manufacturers have already adopted Agile-Stage-Gate and have achieved very positive results. Digital platforms may also be required to support the embedded software. Many manufacturers are already familiar with the technology development process, but this typically is for physical science and invention, not software.

Digital Transformation and Its Impact on New-Product Management for Manufacturers

Product managers are no strangers to transformation. Now product managers need to adjust the contours of their role yet again. In recent years, growing societal concerns about privacy, sustainability, and inclusion—the three factors associated with responsible stewardship—have taken on unprecedented importance. Customers and regulators demand it, and ultimately, corporate bottom lines require it. The cross-functional, linchpin role of product managers makes them particularly well-positioned to navigate these complex issues. But McKinsey research has found that privacy, sustainability, and inclusion are not major areas of strategic focus. All three areas trail behind performance when it comes to how much product managers prioritize them Exhibit 1. To understand current attitudes and approaches, McKinsey conducted interviews and focus groups with several dozen senior product leaders and surveys with more than 50 others. The responses show that each dimension of responsible stewardship presents its own challenges and opportunities. Privacy is the most developed area of responsible innovation and the one that product managers are prioritizing most.

What is Data Product Management?

Keep track of the current schedules of major feature releases across teams with real-time updates as timing changes. Know when your release dates are slipping and by how much due to changes to make informed decisions between business and IT needs. Quickly view the status of each user story associated with a feature in the release pipeline phases from idea to value. Break down operational silos in your releases.

The Impact Strong Product Management Has Across Your Organization

Posted by Maggie Millard. Product managers fulfill a critical role in translating customer needs into product features and improvements. Unfortunately, often internal pressures, external commenters, and poor product management practices hinder managers' ability to deliver products that customers truly value. Another sad reality is that it is common for organizations to make product decisions without really understanding what matters most to the customer. The result is wasted resources, low satisfaction scores, and disengaged team members.

Product Management

Back to guides. But the research process isn't as straightforward as interviewing a few potential customers and calling it a day. Some of the challenges of product research are collecting unbiased data, implementing different research methods, and translating findings into actionable steps for product development. Handling all this can be pretty taxing, and you might be surprised to learn that product team members are only human! Enter product research tools. This article will help you determine which product research tools you need, and why you should add them to your tech stack today. Hotjar gives you the tools to magnify your product research efforts with user behavior insights.

What is the role of a product manager?

Software product management defines how the life cycle of a digital product is managed, planned and governed. Continuous business changes imposed by new technology and the digitalisation of businesses and the society form the environment for modern software development. The programme focuses on the design, implementation and maintenance of software and digital services in their business context. It combines business with software engineering in modern software platforms and ecosystems.

Software Product Management

Both new and experienced product managers often ask where this role came from and why it seems to have so much crossover with other roles such as Marketing and UX. If nothing else it helps to understand the organisational trade-offs that happen as our capabilities and thinking evolve. Modern product management started in with a memo written by Neil H. It started as a justification to hire more people sound familiar to any product managers out there? Uniquely he outlined that the way to do this was through thorough field testing and client interaction. McElroy got his two hires.

We decided to outline key peculiarities as well as describe the benefits of product development management software to ease your choice of a software product development company for successful collaborations in the future. Forbes provides a lot of topics around software product development in one of its IT blogs. Of course, knowing software development methodologies is a must, but at the same time, one should remember following all stages one by one can be a trap. Software product development contributes to your business processes optimization. If the software is customized, it offers a unique solution for building in-house operations, following marketing trends, and keeping your company competitive. To succeed at every stage of software development and continue controlling and tracking the development flow, business owners can apply product development management software.

DigitalSuits is a software development company that focuses on E-Commerce and SaaS solutions mostly for startups and small-medium businesses. The company was founded 5 years ago in We have profound expertise in such domains as e-commerce, real estate, insurance, and fintech. We are experienced in software development, but we also have our own experience with startups.