What Product Managers Need To Know About World-Class Product Development

It's All About The Product

As product managers it is our responsibility to create products that our customers will want and that will end up being profitable for our companies. It turns out that this is no easy task. Identifying what a customer really wants and then turning that into a feature that can be delivered to a customer is hard work. The key to being successful is to understand exactly what goes into world-class product development.

Every product uses some form of technology no matter if the technology is embedded in the product or if it is used to create the product. Product managers play a key role in selecting the correct technologies to use. Any product requires the company to make an investment in it. One aspect of this investment that is important to a product manager is the cost of capital. That money will be spent creating a product team. As product managers we need to realize that we'll have team members of different ages and we need to know how best to manage them all.

As we look around different industries, we look for examples that we can follow when developing products. The competition between Yahoo and Google in the area of financial reporting provides us with some good examples of what to do and what not to do. Because creating a new product is such a risky undertaking, we need to look for ways to hedge our bets. One thing that can reduce our risk is to copy something that someone else has already done. We need to keep in mind the amount of risk that will be involved.

Innovation is the key to creating new products that your customers will want. Examples from companies like Porsche can provide us with suggestions on how to go about doing this. The plan that we create to deliver a new product is just that – a plan. We need to make sure that we take action despite what the plan says in order to make sure that our product is delivered on time. New technologies, such as the Hadoop database, may play a key role in our ability to accomplish this.

For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at:

www.TheAccidentalPM.com

Good luck!

Dr. Jim Anderson

About The Author

I must confess that I never set out to be a product manager. When I went to school, I studied Computer Science and thought that I'd get a nice job programming and that would be that. Well, at least part of that plan worked out!

My first job was working for Boeing on their F/A-18 fighter jet program. I spent my days programming fighter jet software in assembly language and I loved it. The U.S. government decided to save some money and went looking for other countries to sell this plane to. This put me into an unfamiliar role: I started to meet with foreign military officials in order to explain what my product did.

Time moved on and so did I. I found myself working for Siemens, the big German telecommunications company. They were making phone switches and selling them to the seven U.S. phone companies. The problem was that the switches were too complicated. Customers couldn't tell the difference between one complicated phone switch from another complicated phone