Product Management: Bringing New Products to Market

Product Management:

Bringing New Products to Market

Asomi Ithia

Copyright © 2019 Asomi Ithia

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781838597481

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To my family and friends,

thank you for the many words of encouragement on this journey

Contents

Acknowledgements

Welcome

Introduction

1 Setting the path to success

2 Product targets

3 Understanding the customer problem

4 Ideating the product solution

5 Bringing the product solution to life

6 Transitioning from launch to growth and business as usual

7 Accompanying activities

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 continue sharing

Through 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, Bringing New Products to Market starts by framing the idea, this book moves onto setting a motivating vision, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs); 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.

Product Management Series – 4 Books to getting 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 management work in mid-to-large organisations. 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: Managing Existing Products. Beginning with questions that product people need to be able to answer, this book then goes through activities for creating a cadence for developing, optimising and executing strategies to move existing products forward – including objective setting, strategic roadmaps, iterative delivery and much more.

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 events in London.

I hope you enjoy reading Product Management: Bringing New Products to Market 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

New products come in many guises from new to the world, new to the business (e.g. a me-too product that fills a gap created by a competitor’s product), major upgrades and replacement products. The first 2 clearly start with discovery, while the latter 2 present great opportunities to make stepped changes and move away from the status quo.

As a set of activities, creating and launching a product can be broken down into 7 interrelated areas of activity: setting the path to success; establishing product targets; understanding the customer problem and market trends (including creating customer problem statements and conducting research); ideating the product solution; bringing the product solution to life (including personas, customer experience creation, selecting product priorities, managing risks and assumptions, creating and testing product ideas and concepts, and building and launching products); transitioning from launch to growth, and completing a range of accompanying activities.

The central focus in this is about baselining the problemv to be solved and the solution for solving it in a way that provides value to your customers and organisation (figure 1).

Figure 1: Product Creation Equation

Here it is very important to spend time upfront understanding the problem, as opposed to jumping straight into solution build mode. For those who want to get on and create a product, this does not need to be an onerous exercise: understanding the problem does not require weeks, months or years of work before you can get into product build and delivery mode.

Depending on the product and market it may take weeks or months (hopefully not years) to get your product into market. Within that timeframe it is more important to be iteratively engaging and learning from your customers and using this to clearly identify and validate the problem, reduce the risk and evolve towards a product that delivers value (the Pen/Pencil Plan tool, outlined in the book Product Management: Mastering the Product Role, can help with this).

Positively, time spent on each area will help to ensure that you are focusing on the right needs and have a potential demand to fulfil. If you still need convincing, take a cue from the wise words of Einstein: If I had one hour to save the world I would spend 45 minutes defining the problem and only 15 minutes finding the solution.

To help smooth the journey, this book aims to provide a pragmatic approach and set of tools and techniques that you can call on and use to understand your customers and create great products.

Why this approach, as opposed to presenting one way to do the job? Speaking to some great product people and from my experiences, one of the key takeaways has been how the best have a set of tools (written down or in the mind) and are able to pick the best tool for the job in front of them. Not only this, they are able to adapt the tools they have to suit the context, needs and their own abilities. Here they are able to get the job done, not by trying to follow a model to the letter, but by being able to adapt the models.

As you read this book please hold this front of mind and use the content, constructs and models as foundational pieces of your toolkit. So, if you need to get some quick answers to a question, bring your initial ideas to life, generate new ideas, redesign a process or way of working, pick the tool you feel is best suited to the job – as you will see there can be many effective options to pick from.

It’s more important that you follow the principles of understanding the customer problem, clearly defining and delivering a valuable solution, than specific models and approaches.

Lastly, before you jump into the content of the book, I should mention that there is a whole section at the end that talks about the areas of work that accompany core product management activities. This covers product pitches (business case and funding), product budgets, price, customer communications, sales & distribution, customer service & support, operations, partnering (and suppliers), and selling your product internally.

1

Setting the path

to success

Understand the business context and focus

It all starts with the business focus and context – covered in detail in Product Management: Business Context and Focus, so not to be covered in detail here.

In summary, you need to know and understand the broader context that the product is being created in. For instance, why is it being created? What is the business trying to achieve? What does it need to contribute? Where does it fit in the broader organisation? Which decisions have already been made? What work has already been completed vs work you need to do?

In many mid-to-large organisations, understanding the business context and drivers is important for product management as most products are driven by the overarching objectives and strategy that underpin the core business. As Eric and Jonathan¹ wrote in their book ‘How Google Works’: 70% of the company’s efforts are expended on existing product (categories).

In this context new products will take their cue and direction from the business objectives and strategy statements that focus on requirements such as targeting customers the business has not been able to reach with the current products; launching the organisation in overseas markets; maintaining an existing market position; taking advantage of new channels; driving increased engagement (which in turn drives additional revenue); launching a range of new or existing products; addressing a threat posed by existing or new competitors, and making the most of gaps left by competitors who are underserving their customers and ‘leaving food on the table’. The list goes on and will include many other cues specific to your organisation.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that all new products come from executive decisions. Most do, but some can come from functional or product areas and employee ideas (bottom-up) and then be linked to the business strategy – this does happen, but at a lower ratio than initiatives driven by executive teams.

Lastly, although this book places the product management team at the centre of the main activities to bring a new product to market, this may not be strictly true in your organisation, and you need to consider the role of product management alongside other teams in the business. The varying ways the product management role can fit alongside teams such as strategy, marketing and sales is covered in the book Product Management: Mastering the Product Role.

Frame the product context and idea

With clear parameters set and understood, frame the new product idea. A few lines, as illustrated below, are enough to contextualise the starting point and any parameters that are driving it.

At a UK bank, the framing included the fact that the business was working on a public/private partnership to deliver an identity platform for access to public sector services. Off the back of this, there was an opportunity to create an identity platform that existing and new customers could use to access commercial services. As well as delivering a new and valuable service to customers, it could generate a new revenue stream and encourage customer loyalty to the bank’s core services.

At a media company, the existing site was broken, losing customers, revenue, and profit margin. It was also generating costs in other parts of the business (e.g. customer service was fixing problems it was causing). To get it up to a minimum standard would take too long and the benefits would outweigh the cost. Therefore, to move forward it was decided to create a new market-leading online channel that delivered a superior customer experience, generated revenues and met the needs of customers and internal and external stakeholders.

At an entertainment company, a valuable chunk of the addressable market (many of whom wanted the products and services) was not being served due to limitations in the way content was being distributed and the monthly payment model. Added to this, new customer acquisition was starting to slow and new internet based content providers were starting to grow and establish a strong base. To meet the demand, maximise the opportunity and address the potential challenge, the business took the decision to launch a new internet based product offering.

At a foreign currency exchange company, the aim was to create a product that made it frictionless to access money around the world. As a business that delivered most of its foreign currency exchange over the counter, it was potentially