Product Management Challenges - II

This article is continuation of earlier Product Management Challenges - I and highlights the tough road being traversed by this genre of managers.

Competitive Landscape in an “IT Doesn’t Matter” era

If we go by Nicholas Carr’s famous article, Information Technology as a whole is becoming a commodity which no more would give a sustainable competitive advantage. So , business acceptance of a software product for purchase considerations is slowly getting apprehensive. “Why to invest further on IT if they are able to go business-as-usual?” or “Today we are implementing Oracle Apps R12, tomorrow we need to migrate to Fusion, there is no end to it”. So any software product should provide ample value proposition to the customer which compels him/her to try/buy it. Add the competitors to it and your product sustainability and customer lock-ins are always at a threat. That’s why we see many product start-ups initially working in stealth mode, doing their own internal pilot testing , getting the relevant product and consumer insights to get a differentiatied offering which would outsmart their competitors.

Resource Crunch

This is especially in the area of user experience designing. There are very few visual and interaction designer and many times their scarcity limits the firm capability to form the crux of the product team. If there are no designers working side by side with the product managers & engineers, it will limit what each of them can do.

Consumerisation

In layman’s view , it refers to the blurring line between the consumer and enterprise technology needs. And many a times, a new technological product is launched first to ordinary end user and once the product gets popular amongst the masses, it is being offered to the enterprise customers with additional value layers. For example, Google’s Application products were first opened to the masses and then it came up with the enterprise version. Apple recently launched Joint Venture, a tech support offering for small businesses covering the products like Mac, iPhone, iPad -- the very same ones which got sold off to general consumer. The challenge is to formulate your product strategy and roadmap across these blurring lines , to accept that the B2B and B2C distinction of end product usage is fast getting extinct.

The Successful Company Trap

Seeing the Google making hoards of money and awed by the fantastic products line from Apple, are you thinking to do product management like them? Be cautious. The point to be noted is that while Google & Apple have their own models of product management, the same might not give you a success formula. Their model is fit for them (until their founders remain so deeply involved in their product offering).

Cloud : SaaP vs SaaS

Cloud is both a challenge as well as an opportunity. If the existing product line is not web-based , then the firm has the danger of losing out on its existing and prospective customers. This is particularly important in emerging markets where the consumer is not ready to pay too much for the software product and hence the rise of ad-supported freemium business model in these markets. With SaaS the switching costs are decreasing plus the anytime anywhere access of the product which brings newer challenges to the product manager to continually improvise on the product for customer retention.

Customer vs Consumer

Often the people that make the purchase decision are very different than those that actually use and and are dependant on the product. The product manager ends up being responsible for a product that will be sold to (or used by) people he has never met, to people that speak a language he doesn’t understand, subject to laws that he isn’t aware of, and pay by mechanisms he has never used. The platform product management is a good example - Adobe offers Photoshop which is being used by slew of designers to create media/flash applications which are finally ‘consumed’ by totally set of people.