Product management is a guide for each step of the product's lifecycle, and that guide always focuses on the product and the customers who must use that product.
Every product manager understands that for the best product development, it is necessary to hear the voice of the customers and market. And thanks to the whole product management team and mentorship, the customers have high-quality and well-designed products.
The Importance of Product Management and Product Life Cycle
Since the 1930s, product management has operated business processes and brought professional growth to product organizations across the globe. So, the world needs good product managers because these individuals must manage whole areas of product management, understand touchpoints, and have a passion for it.
Product management is full of helpful strategies which with each product team can overall big success for products in different marketplaces. So, this is an excellent tool for every marketer and if you are interested in this, continue to read because, in this article, you can find eight major areas of product management. Let's explore those areas together.
Product Discovery
Product discovery is the first major area of the product management process. This actually has two essential parts. First is exploring all about your customers or users, and second is using that information for valuable results. Product discovery is the crucial aspect of creating a winning product management strategy.
This is a significant factor in helping product management teams understand and decide which products, features, or services need to create. In simple words, this is the only way to build products that want and need customers. And this also gives value to the product management team. In this case, use a project management time tracker to keep up with all the updates and improvements.
So, this process has many vital elements that you need to follow. First, it is essential to have customer empathy, understand users' and customers' emotions, feelings, and needs, and also provide happy lead journeys. In this case, it will be best to have a user persona; with this help, you will have an extensive view of your user's behavior and customs.
In this product management area, it can also help to collect customer feedback from different platforms(email, social media audit, customer service, etc.) and listen to them. And indeed, don't remember to test, test, and test assumptions and be sure that the process goes its own way.
Product Analytics
The following area of product management is product analytics. This process implies the ways how users or customers engage and have an experience with a product or service. Product analytics track user engagement and behavior to optimize the product-building process. In contrast, product discovery process product analytics offer metrics to calculate users' engagement and understand where needs improvement.
You may say, "How can product analytics help the product life cycle?"
So, let's understand several benefits that can bring product analytics. This analytics, first, builds better customer relationships. The more you analyze your product life cycle and test it; the more users will use it in the future.
Besides, product analytics offer directions to your product's future. This looks like a light that guides you since product launching and also after that for product features. Data you collect with the help of analytics will help you have a powerful understanding of product present features without any emotional biases.
Analytics is also beneficial for the product manager, developers, designers, marketers, and all stakeholders. So this can help all product management teams focus on their work, make a happy team, and bring excellent outcomes with effectiveness. So, use product analytics, listen to your mentors in Mentor Cruise, and enjoy outcomes. Now let's explore several exciting facts about product planning.
Product Planning
Product management planning is to organize and plan all your desired outcomes and measure them to get a successful development process. Simply put, this process involves defining outcomes, discovering all elements that your product needs to have, and creating strategies for each of the product life cycle parts.
A well-organized product planning offers clearly defined outcomes, fixed issues, product design without biases, etc. The benefits are many, and it is real support for the product management process. The essential part of the planning process is surely establishing your outcomes.
The essential part of the product planning process is defining outcomes that will bring business success based on collected data and insights. Successful product planning can be as effective as setting the right results and regularly measuring your success in achieving them.
Imagine that you have a product idea and want to generate it. If you plan the results which you want with your mentors in Mentor Cruise or colleagues, you have a clear understanding of how your product looks for the desired results. The product planning process must involve the whole product team, key stakeholders, and also future users or customers. They all must join the process to work effectively and have a clear understanding of the product life cycle.
Product Roadmap
The following product management area is a product roadmap, which is a summary of your product vision, goals, direction, and so on. This map answers questions like "Why did you build that product?" or "Which goals do you have for your product?" This is like a guideline with strategies and tactics.
The product roadmap includes many goals that match your product vision and help the product team to keep an eye on the product life cycle. There are several tips for product roadmaps like internal roadmaps for executives, internal roadmaps for engineers, a roadmap for sales, and a roadmap for customers and prospects.
You can create your roadmap with a lot of useful software, add visual elements and review it if necessary. With this software, you can also share a present product roadmap with your team and stakeholders. Also, you can share it with your email, and remember to protect and give value to your email with the DMARC report. Now let's understand how you can present your roadmap effectively.
So, first, it would be best if you understood your audience. In other words, you need to update your product roadmap depending on your audience and who you should share your roadmap with. Also, you must pay attention and focus on narratives because storytelling is an excellent part of product management. This provides emotions and feelings on your product life cycle and makes it easy to have experience with the product no matter if you are a stakeholder or user.
Project Management
It is essential for you to understand the role of project management in the product life cycle because they go hand in hand and can work very effectively if they work together. Product management includes many processes, and these processes can work great only with project management principles.
So, this crucial area involves controlling, planning, and executing the whole team's work, giving each team member the right task, managing team members' working process, reviewing their work and keeping goals and KPIs in mind for the product team. So, this is an essential administrative part of every product's life cycle.
With following best practices and mentorships in Mentor Cruise, every project manager can make your work more productive with AI integration. Yeah, software and tools can always help project managers, whether they are managing a product team or something else. Those tools run with activation functions that decide whether neurons activate or not. So with these tools, it is always easy to manage your team working process and make enormous progress.
Starting from the product discovery process to product launching, the role of managers is big. They also help to communicate with team members together, do teamwork, and therefore have excellent results. It would really support your team to invest in project management and have all the necessary tools for an effective combination of work. Moreover, you should also invest in communication solutions such as call center technologies, Zoom, and other methods.
Management does not mean creating meaningless meetings or spending time with your team members on useless things. This is about managing a team effectively and letting each team member use their full potential.
Stakeholder Management
The essential part of product management is surely stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who are involved in the product development process. For example, if you have a little startup with five or six team members, your stakeholders will be that five or six people and also investors, if you already have them. Stakeholders are both your team members and also your clients, investors, and mentors, which you find in Mentor Cruise, etc.
So stakeholder management played a big role in the product management process. There are many strategies that you can use to manage your product stakeholders. You always need to think with strategy when it is about your stakeholders because every successful product management has positive stakeholder engagement. One of those strategies is stakeholder mapping.
Stakeholder mapping is an excellent method to understand and define which stakeholders want to be involved in what and also when. This map includes both external and also internal stakeholders. This includes team members, designers who create a logo design and also UX designers, investors, software engineers, etc. So a stakeholder map will help you understand all your stakeholders and connect with them.
Another critical strategy for stakeholder management is stakeholder prioritization. This looks like mapping and has similar benefits. Prioritization can always help you divide stakeholders into groups based on their interests in the product. So, you can divide them according to high power-low interest, high power-high interest, low power-low interest, and low power-high interest. This will help you understand the percentage of your stakeholders involved in the process.
Pricing and Revenue Modeling
And the final major area of product management is pricing and revenue modeling. Every product manager understands that the primary goal of a product or service is to give value. So, thinking strategically about product pricing and revenue modeling is most important. You must calculate and understand your investment and also model your future revenue. Before starting this, it would be best to explore several factors about your product.
First, you need to understand the type of your product and decide on pricing depending on which value it can bring. Another factor is the market landscape. This means that you need to explore several factors about your market and understand competitors. This will later help you with strategies like social media management, sales, promotional campaigns, and more.
Second, you must pay attention to product positioning, which means you need time to time to update your product positioning. Also necessary to understand your company or startup's organizational needs and choose the most relevant price for desired outcomes.
Let's understand the psychology of product pricing in more detail. Each one(be it buyer, product manager, or team member) has their own ideas about product price and value, and this is the major difficulty of product pricing. For a good determination of the product's price points, you need to pay attention to several statistics and calculate all risks. You can also follow various SaaS pricing models to largely understand how to choose product pricing models. There are flat-fee pricing, freemium pricing, usage pricing, etc. Explore all of them in more detail and identify the relevant ways to pricing and revenue modeling.
Ready to Invest in Product Management?
In closing, as an essential aspect of each business, product management controls the product life cycle from beginning to end and brings desired outcomes. Well-organized product management always focuses on customer experience, solutions, market challenges, and trends and guides the product's life to success.
So investing in product management can be your first step to having success and achieving long-term outcomes. As a product manager, you must apply and analyze all these product management areas and invest in successful product launching.
When we say product, it means not only just product; it means the offering of services, too. For a good product and service development, you surely need to pay attention to product development areas and bring up the full potential of your product.
Take advice from product management mentors of MentorCruise for the right process of product management, explore and know more about product management and use this tool for a successful product life cycle.
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Flora is an enthusiastic and creative SEO Content Writer at Saynine.ai who is passionate about blog articles on topics like digital marketing, advertising and similar. She has written for various industries but is mostly focused on SaaS.