Product Management For Dummies. Brian Lawley

Product Management For Dummies

ley

Product Management For Dummies®

Product Management For Dummies^®

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962002

ISBN 978-1-119-26402-6 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-26403-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-26404-0 (ebk)

Introduction

Product management is a critical strategic driver in a company. It can make a huge impact in terms of whether products, as well as the entire company, succeed or fail in both the short and long term. It’s the only role in a company that grasps all aspects of the business, including customers, the market, competition, trends, strategy, business models, and more. As such, great product management makes great companies.

While writing Product Management For Dummies, we tapped into our combined 60 years of hands-on product management experience. We also took advantage of the methodology and learning we’ve discovered working with tens of thousands of clients and individual product managers over the past 20 years in the product management consulting and training business. The resulting book, we hope, will allow you to discover and apply great product management concepts to your business and products to create massive success.

Product management has grown tremendously in importance in the corporate world in the past 10 years, as have the resources available to learn about it. As authors, we can sincerely say that we wish there had been a book like this when we were just starting in the profession. We had to learn much of what is in this book by trial and error. We owe a great debt to our mentors and the organizations we’ve had the privilege of working for.

If you’re looking for the link to the downloadable Product Management LifeCycle Toolkit, jump to the “Beyond the Book” section later in this Introduction. We wish you tremendous success in delivering products that truly delight your customers!

About This Book

Product management as a topic is vast. The breadth of knowledge you need to be an effective product manager is very complex. The best answer to a question that arises is “It depends.” As such, covering concepts from all angles was a challenge. We have done our best to provide a well-rounded look at the product management profession.

One of the beauties of a product management career is that you can make how you perform your job unique to who you are. Rather than envisioning this book as a prescriptive set of rules, imagine it as a starting point in your own career. Understand why a concept is important and then pretend you are playing a jazz score. You find yourself improvising actions while keeping the end goal in mind. This is the true fascination of this work: It is endlessly different while retaining core principles.

Product Management For Dummies is intended for all product management audiences: new product managers, those who are looking to enter the field, and businesspeople and entrepreneurs who want to apply product management best practices in their companies. We give you guidelines as to what you should be doing given your situation at any particular time; share when you’re likely to be thrown off track; and provide handy lists, tables, and figures for reference. For those with more experience in product management, the book no doubt has some concepts you’ve never experienced and can serve as a good refresher on other things you have picked up along the way. Because product managers are by and large self-taught, for certain topics, you can at least take comfort in that you’re on the right track. We also hope that you can use the book to review, enhance, and extend the excellent work you’re already doing. With more information and preparation, you’ll have more confidence in reining in a difficult situation and the ability to keep the project and your product headed in a good direction.

Here are a few conventions we use throughout the book:

❯❯ Info in the shaded sidebars or marked with Technical Stuff icons is text you can skip if you’re short on time. It’s good information, but it’s nonessential to the main concept.

❯❯ We often use the term product to refer to both products and services even though a product is typically an actual physical good and a service refers to the work done by individuals and companies for customers. In any case, the basic concepts of product management are all highly applicable to products, services, and hybrid offerings.

❯❯ Product marketing is a term that you may have heard interchangeably or in conjunction with product management. Its focus is typically responsible for making sure that the marketing, messaging, pricing, and other critical marketing success factors are in place.

Some companies have a dedicated product management group. Some companies have a dedicated product marketing group, and some companies have both product management and product marketing groups. And some companies have groups (called either of these terms) where the individuals perform all of the responsibilities for both.

In this book, we refer to both product management and product marketing using the term product management only. In this context it covers all activities in a product’s life from conception of the initial idea to when the

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