How important is product management for your startup?
Are you trying to wrap your head around the role of product management and why it is important for the venture? If so, you are not alone anymore. In today’s economic climate, many entrepreneurs and business professionals are becoming more cautious about their bottom lines, reorganizing resources, the process to minimize the redundancy and to reduce costs and to restructure their resources.
So the product management is the only one function that is offering business startups the significant advantages such as in setting up business objectives, targeting markets to deliver measurable products and services, and prioritizing the goals of startups. Still confused about the concept of product management? Keep on reading this article in order to get a better idea what a product management framework is, and why is essential for every startup?
What is Product Management?
Well, the concept of product management is increasingly prevalent for both the startups and enterprise companies, but it’s still difficult to define it in a single sentence. That’s because it doesn’t fit any of the traditional roles you may already be familiar with: business strategy, design, marketing, and engineering. Product management is the voice of the competitive market inside the business venture.
The market in the product management include the customers, and non-customers, buyers and users at companies in target market segments. To be simple, the product management is an interdisciplinary role that reaches across teams to design, bring better products to the market, set your business plan, and marketing.
Let’s take an example in order to get a better idea about the concept of product management. If you are developing a website and writing code for it, without even understanding of who will be using your services and products? In fact, how you are going to compete with your rivals in the competitive business world, how you plan to drive adoption and make money.
In that case, the odds of the success diminish dramatically, and your startup cannot be stand out of the crowd. This is the main reason, why startups and enterprise companies need the product management strategies to get their startups off the ground. It is responsible for defining the product strategy, developing a roadmap, and setting up a product vision in the market that meets both company goals and user needs. Let’s take a look at the reasons why product management is vital for your startup and how it can help you in growing your business.
#1 Reason- Know Your Competitors
As a matter of the fact that entrepreneurship is about creating values for the user, for the supplier, and for the employees. So the first and foremost reason for adopting the product management strategies is that it helps to know the competitors in order to diminish the odds of the success. It also helps to understand who your competitors are, and how your competitors price and their offerings can affect your business in the competitive world.
Thus you all are required to know both their paid-for features and free offerings in order to get a better understanding of your competitors. In simple words, with the help of the product management, you can collect and develop new ideas to solve the existing problems in the market and discover new opportunities and can stand out of the crowd. It is the cornerstone of product management.
In order to collect the information about your competitors, you can use a simple exercise of building a matrix that lists your competitor’s core features in Column A with your offerings in Column B onwards. Highlight the elements which is addressed by your competitor’s, and which isn’t. You can also get creative and create one matrix for free, another for paid, etc.
#2 Reason- Roadmapping
The next phase of product management is to encounter all your entire product strategy, your vision about your products and focus on the initiatives so that it can line up with the big idea of the product. Well, roadmapping is a communication tool that helps to communicate where you are, where are you heading, and how you expect to accomplish. A good product roadmap is clear, visual, and accessible enough for everyone involved to understand.
For this, you can also use the competitive matrix exercise in order to get honest with yourself and with your offerings. Because by doing roadmapping, you will get an idea where you are weak and at what point, your products and services are stronger than your rivals. More importantly, knowing where you’ll differentiate with your competitors helps guide where your focus should be when positioning yourself against your competition.
#3 Reason- Know your Customers
Well, you must be cautioned about why this reason is essential for developing your business in the business world? The simple answer to this question is that it forces one to be clear about who’s going to buy your products and services, and how they will benefit from using your product. If your customers or users are not happy with your offering, then there is no point of doing business.
So, if you are willing to scale your business venture, you need to add the product management in your plan because it will provide direct insights and suggestions to you in order to understand how you are going to solve the problems and increase your sales. More importantly, it will help you in getting the feedback of your targeted customers and users from different sources, including support requests, usability testing, customer interviews, and general conversations with the prospects and customers and prospects.
#4 Reason- Prototype
As soon as you are done with collecting the feedback of your targeted audiences, the next step is to prototype your thinking for the success of your business. The goal as you move through these stages is to avoid writing code as much as possible. Might you be wondering about “No code? But how is this possible?”
Well, collecting all the things in a bucket is the simple step, but it is a handy technique to conceptualize functionality from a user interface perspective. The idea of product management is to provide an interactive prototype, i.e a user can click on buttons, interact with dropdowns, etc, as though the application was real.
Once you build an interactive prototype for your business, these will serve as an inspiration for you in order to push beyond the boundaries of developing a classic and predictable solution as per your requirements. In fact, many startups, take help from various tools such as PowerPoint, with add-ins such as PowerMockup, and much more to refine your target market segments through the market research stage.
#5 Reason- Prioritise Tasks
As a matter of fact, small business owners, and entrepreneurs are juggling with multiple tasks and stakeholders at one time. It is evident that with the passage of time, you will be unable to handle all the things at the same time. That’s why prioritizing the responsibilities come into place to reduce the redundancy of work. Prioritizing the tasks is an ongoing process of determining the best outcome from work in order to bring the most value to the user and what is feasible.
If you want to develop your business at a fast pace, you need to use your time wisely by on focusing on day-to day-tactical activities that contribute to meeting the needs of the majority of your target customers as much as possible. You can also implement a way to capture early adopter interest via a signup form and get the feedback from your users.
Just remember that if you have done the exercise of prioritizing your tasks right, then the odds of your business will be adjusted to reflect real customer needs. That’s a great thing because your roadmap is now aligned with what customers want or need.
#6 Reason- Lock a Plan
With a prototype that customers have reviewed with feedback incorporated, a clear prioritization that’s been validated by customers, now you are in a position to set up a business plan. That plan which can quickly evolve into customer-centric stories and epics and can break down by stage of the product lifecycle per your prioritization. Well, this is the last reason for the importance of product management for your startup. But if you did this phase correctly, the entire process would automatically go right and will help in getting success for your future.
Conclusion
Whether you are an entrepreneur running the startup or a product manager managing a product in the corporate environment or a business owner striving to establish their startup, product management is that thing which you all required at every stage of your business. It will help your team to capture and transform customer insights into full product experiences that in turn increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and your business values.
