Product management

Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a

company dealing with the planning or marketing of a product or products at
all stages of the product lifecycle.

Product management (inbound focused) and product marketing (outbound

focused) are different yet complementary efforts with the objective of
maximizing sales revenues, market share, and profit margins. The role of
product management spans many activities from strategic to tactical and
varies based on the organizational structure of the company. Product
management can be a function separate on its own or a member of
marketing or engineering.

While involved with the entire product lifecycle, product management's main
focus is on driving new product development. According to the Product
Development and Management Association (PDMA), superior and
differentiated new products - ones that deliver unique benefits and superior
value to the customer - is the number one driver of success and product
profitability

Aspects of product management:

Depending on the company size and history, product management has a

variety of functions and roles. Sometimes there is a product manager, and
sometimes the role of product manager is held by others. Frequently there is
Profit and Loss (P&L) responsibility as a key metric for evaluating product
manager performance. In some companies, the product management
function is the hub of many other activities around the product. In others, it
is one of many things that need to happen to bring a product to market.
Product management often serves an inter-disciplinary role, bridging gaps
within the company between teams of different expertise, most notably
between engineering-oriented teams and business-oriented teams. For
example product managers often translate business objectives set for a
product by Marketing or Sales into engineering requirements. Conversely
they may work to explain the capabilities and limitations of the finished
product back to Marketing and Sales.

Product planning:

• Identifying new product candidates

• Gathering market requirements

• Determine business-case and feasibility

• Scoping and defining new products at high level

• Evangelizing new products within the company

• Building product roadmaps, particularly Technology roadmaps

• Product Life Cycle considerations

• Product differentiation

• Detailed Product planning

Product marketing:

• Product positioning and outbound messaging

• Promoting the product externally with press, customers, and partners

• Bringing new products to market

• Monitoring the competition

Product marketing deals with the first of the "4P"'s of marketing, which are
Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion. Product marketing, as opposed to
product management, deals with more outbound marketing tasks. For
example, product management deals with the nuts and bolts of product
development within a firm, whereas product marketing deals with marketing
the product to prospects, customers, and others. Product marketing, as a job
function within a firm, also differs from other marketing jobs such as Marcom
or marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing
strategy, etc.

A Product Market is something that is referred to when pitching a new

product to the general public. The people you are trying to make your
product appeal to be your consumer market. For example: If you were
pitching a new video game console game to the public, your consumer
market would probably be the adult male Video Game market (depending on
the type of game). Thus you would carry out market research to find out how
best to release the game. Likewise, a massage chair would probably not
appeal to younger children, so you would market your product to an older
generation.

Role of product marketing:

Product marketing in a business addresses five important strategic questions

 What products will be offered (i.e., the breadth and depth of the
product line)?

 Who will be the target customers (i.e., the boundaries of the market
segments to be served)?

 How will the products reach those (i.e., the distribution channel)?

 How much the products should be priced at?

 How to introduce the products (i.e., the way to promote the products)?
Product marketing vs. product management:

Product marketing frequently differs from product management in high-tech

companies. Whereas the product manager is required to take a product's
requirements from the sales and marketing personnel and create a product
requirements document (PRD), which will be used by the engineering team
to build the product, the product marketing manager can be engaged in the
task of creating a marketing requirements document (MRD), which is used as
source for the product management to develop the PRD.

In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and the
PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving
product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like
hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. This
requires the product marketing manager to be skilled not only in competitor
analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business
oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology
investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or
customers can be changed so that they buy the company's product.

In smaller high-tech firms or start-ups, product marketing and product

management functions can be blurred, and both tasks may be borne by one
individual. However, as the company grows someone needs to focus on
creating good requirements documents for the engineering team, whereas
someone else needs to focus on how to analyze the market, influence the
"analysts", press, etc. When such clear demarcation becomes visible, the
former falls under the domain of product management, and the latter, under
product marketing. In Silicon Valley, in particular, product marketing
professionals have considerable domain experience in a particular market or
technology or both. Some Silicon Valley firms have titles such as Product
Marketing Engineer, who tend to be promoted to managers in due course.
The trend that is emerging in Silicon Valley is for companies to hire a team of
a product marketing manager with a technical marketing manager. The
Technical Marketing role is becoming more valuable as companies become
more competitive and seeks to reduce costs and time to market.