It's simple to explain why marketing is so crucial. The company benefits from a bigger volume of high-quality leads that convert to sales possibilities. Similarly, a strong sales staff will qualify these prospects before turning them into income. In terms of the technical side of the business, a top-notch development team following a well-defined procedure will provide a high-quality product that customers will like. The missing link in all of this is identifying what that product should do and what problems it should solve for those who buy it. This is where the role of product management comes into play.
Why is product management important for your company?
Fundamentally, no one else in the business can achieve their goals if the product is the incorrect one or solves the wrong problems:
When it comes to locating new clients, marketing will face an uphill battle. Prospect conversion will be difficult for sales and development could waste time creating a high-quality product that doesn't tackle the relevant challenges.
Product management is a crucial component of any business. However, having a product manager does not guarantee that client issues will be resolved. It's pointless to hire a product manager if they aren't working in an atmosphere that allows them to accomplish their job well. Customer problems will be solved if you create a good product culture that allows them to thrive and collaborate with other parts of the company.
What does a product culture that works look like?
The most important thing a product manager can do is learn. It should be supported, and the lessons learnt should allow for change. In product management, learning can take many forms – it doesn't have to be research-based (though it is a fantastic place to start). Experimentation is crucial, but it can be intimidating. Experimenting with a project implies exposing it to failure, albeit on a small scale. It's a lot easier to accept that your anticipated path will fail if you discover it during the prototype stage rather than at the end of a costly project.
Starting small and iterating makes it easier to offer value to the market sooner. An MVP (minimum viable product) will provide immediate value to some clients and allow you to learn from their feedback as you develop more sophisticated features.
It's unrealistic to expect product managers to foresee the future. With this in mind, an outcome-based roadmap is a wonderful tool for product managers to utilize when talking about product direction and strategy without getting into dates. This eliminates the ball and chain of (inaccurate) release date from the conversation, making it easier to agree on expected outcomes. When it comes to planning ahead, a release plan is essential. Those release dates, however, are meaningless without a lean, purposeful roadmap to serve as a foundation.
Roadmaps based on outcomes are the way to go. With all of this talk about compromise, consensus, and experimenting, it's critical that we don't forget about psychological safety. Consider learning to swim as an example. Until we've learned the skill, we'll need a buoyancy aid or a tutor to assist us to stay afloat. Similarly, while we discover what works, we need to feel safe about the repercussions of failure. Having top leadership backing is a key component of that. It's fine if an experiment fails as long as something valuable is learned. When experiments are brief, simple, and low-cost, and have a clearly specified hypothesis, opinion is removed from the discussion. As a result, people are less likely to be labelled as "wrong."
This is a lean product culture that is being discussed. It achieves the best results while consuming the least amount of time and effort. When all of these factors are considered, it's easy to see why lean product management minimizes the likelihood of a company failing. With that in mind, why not create a product culture that you can be proud of?