Product Management: Managing Existing Products

Copyright © 2019 Asomi Ithia

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To you, thank you for joining me on this journey

Contents

Acknowledgements

Welcome

Introduction

1 Context

2 Vision, problem and solution statements (revisited)

3 Product targets

4 Creating the product strategy and roadmap

5 Delivering

Case study

That’s it

References

Notes

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped to make this book possible, through giving up their time to speak about their experiences and product management perspectives, whilst also listening to my thoughts and ideas, and providing feedback on the drafts. To each and every one, I say ‘thank you very much’. It’s with your input that this final product exists.

Thank you

Abdul Terry

Abisola Fatokun

Adam Warburton

Ahron Geminder

Ali Hussein

Alison Cusack

Allen Bastow

Amar Melwani

Andrew Rollason

Andy Black

Antoinette Lynch

Brendan Marry

Calvin Faife

Caspar Atkinson

Claire Hall

David Matthews

DC Patel

Denise Bennett

Diana Spiridon

Elisabeth Schloemmer

Gareth Capon

Garry Prior

James Gamble

James Routledge

Janna Bastow

Jas Ahluwalia

Joe Darkins

Jonathan Culling

Ken Kwabiah

Ladislav Bartos

Laura Nana

Leanne Cummings

Lester Bunn

Luca Vincenti

Manish Sahni

Marianna Satanas

Martin Ericsson

Michael Dargue

Michael Smith

Mike Darcy

Nick Charalambous

Nicky Hickman

Paul Cutter

Peter Bricknell

Peter McInally

Peter Newman

Peter Simon

Phoebe Innes-Wilson

Randy Silver

Rob Crook

Sabine Bickle

Sabine Capes

Stephen McDonald

Stuart Moore

Welcome

I’d like to share

In this final instalment of the Product Management Series of 4 Booksi, I’d like to share product management thoughts and lessons gained from my experiences, and those of product practitioners and leading organisations.

The discipline of product management has seen significant change in its importance and application over the past 10+ years. Much of this has been driven by factors, such as increased customer power; a realisation that understanding and serving customer needs is critical to business success; the need to move quickly to maximise opportunities before someone else does or it disappears; new internet-age opportunities and business models; advancements in technology that make it easier to create products at scale, and changes in thinking about how organisations get work done.

Taking this into account, the purpose of the Product Management Series of books is to provide useful and thought-provoking insights that help product people, in mid to large organisations, get product management done in a pragmatic way that meets the needs of customers and the organisation.

Whether already deep in the product management trenches, or at the early stages of your career, the Product Management Series seeks to add to your knowledge and skills.

This book, Managing Existing Products starts with questions that product people need to be able to answer, it goes through a set of activities for creating a cadence for developing, optimising and executing live product strategies, including objective setting, strategic roadmaps, iterative delivery and much more.

Product Management Series – 4 books to help get product management done

Combined with this book, the Product Management Series is designed to cover the spectrum of activities required to create, deliver and manage products that create value for your customers and business.

Product Management: Mastering the Product Role. Opening with definitions of the business/customer value exchange, products, product management and its core and accompanying activities, the book goes onto outline a number of potential fits for the product in different organisational contexts. It then moves onto define product management roles, responsibilities, skills and competencies; provides guidance for being an effective product person; advice for nurturing and developing your product talent, and suggestions for engaging and working with stakeholders and making the product work in mid-to-large enterprises. Lastly, it covers a few thoughts on the future of product management and provides 2 tools for incrementally planning and reviewing progress.

Product Management: Understanding Business Context and Focus covers how business context and focus relates to, and impacts, product management from the vision statement to goals, objectives, strategy, values and culture. It specifically looks at what each encompasses, different approaches organisations take to setting and implementation, and how this flows down to, and impacts, product management at a functional level.

Product Management: Bringing New Products to Market. Starting from framing the idea, this book moves onto setting a motivating vision, objectives and key performance indicators (KPI); understanding customers and using this to create and deliver new products into market. Supporting areas that product people need to, as a minimum, understand and may need to get involved in defining and delivering, are also covered.

Each book is laid out in a way that makes it easy to jump to particular topical areas. All areas of content are brought to life with constructs, figures, references and samples of experiences from product practitioners.

Customer and business needs

Businesses and customers have a co-dependency. Illustrated at the beginning of Product Management: Mastering the Product Role, this can be described as a bi-directional business/customer value exchange (or relationship) that delivers value to both.

As an important part of being in business, all books in the series aim to address this through covering the business and customer sides of product management, in equal measure. In short, a key theme of the books is to absolutely obsess about meeting customer needs, but without losing focus or being apologetic about ensuring that the business achieves a return for its hard work.

Do it your way

We are all different, work differently and face situations that require different approaches. The books aim (as much as possible) to provide a flexible approach that includes options over a rigid set of rules, frameworks, or models.

Let me explain.

While meeting and interviewing product people for this book, one striking occurrence was the infrequency that they talked about frameworks or models. Most tended to just talk about how they ‘got stuff done’. Here or there a model or framework would be mentioned, but in the main, more was said about ways of working and activities.

So, what does this mean for frameworks, models and constructs (of which the books contain a few)?

There is no doubt that they deliver immense valueii. But not purely in a form that must be followed without deviation. When asked about frameworks and models, many of the people I interviewed had read about them, listened to people talk about them and been on training courses to learn about them. However, once past this learning, they either treat them as guides to help direct their work, pick parts to use when the need arises, or use them whole (when required).

In doing this, they have mastered the art of knowing when to use whole or parts of each – they have created their own approaches that work for their skills and context.

This series is about continuously learning and challenging yourself to find new and better ways to deliver value – the books aim to support this by providing insights that help you build your knowledge and skill sets, and ultimately your own way to get product management done.

As you read, the content should be used as a guide that helps you understand key concepts and define your own approach. To support this, where possible, options have been added to help you select the path that is right for you, your organisation and context.

About me

I have been working in product management and product marketing for over 20 years in small and large businesses including BT, 02, Thomson Reuters, Sky and Barclays. In my time I have worked across all stages of the product lifecycle using a range of techniques to understand customer needs and deliver products against them – along the way I have experienced many ups and downs and never stopped learning. I have also had the opportunity to work with some great people, from whom I have learned so much (I know, it’s a cliché, but very true).

Lastly, I co-host a product meet-up in London called The Product Groupiii. It’s a great place for topical debate, listening to product stories and meeting with great product people. I can also regularly be found at the monthly Product Tankiv in London.

I hope you enjoy reading Product Management: Managing Existing Products and find the series useful in your quest to get product done for your customers and business.

Asomi Ithia

www.asomiithia.com

www.productmanagementseries.com

Introduction

You may have launched the product, been given it when you joined the company or took on a new role. The product may be doing very well; floating along with little direction or purpose; going through a period of declining sales, profits or customer engagement; facing serious competition and threats to existing revenue streams; at a crossroad; trying to please new and existing customers; in demand (e.g. the business wants more from it), and many more scenarios.

Whichever of these (or any other scenarios), it’s now your job to drive the product forward and in doing so create a cadence that will see it through the next phases of its life.

To deliver value to customers and the business you need to understand and manage your product context, have a vision and objectives, set the strategy, create your roadmap and then deliver against it.

At any point in time multiple factors, such as changing customer needs; competitor actions; market instability; status of the product and lifecycle stage; business direction; stakeholder demands; frequency of planning and execution cycles; and tenure and knowledge of the product team will impact the time, effort, importance and urgency placed on each of these areas.

Take an enabling product that is operating in a stable market, this may not require much discussion to understand the context and plan what’s next. While a product in a rapidly changing and competitive environment may need