Ever wondered what difference it would make if you unearthed some cool secrets about successful product management?
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a product manager, you’d have fancied this thought at some point or the other in your professional life.
Being one of the most versatile profiles in any industry, the role of a product manager is never limited to one stream.
From product ideation and development to data-driven marketing and sales, their plate is always overflowing with crucial responsibilities.
In other words, a product manager will play a major role in transforming an exciting idea into a profitable product. And that makes the role extremely challenging as your products need to stand out from the rest.
If you’re at the stage where an innovative product strategy is inevitable, you need to take note of the product management secrets that I am going to discuss below.
Without delay, let’s dive right in.
Top 6 Product Management Secrets You Should Know
The product management secrets discussed here can be applied at different stages of your product lifecycle to ensure that your product is successful.
1. Understand Your Company’s Goals
As a product manager, your product management strategy should be in line with your company’s goals. And if you’re doing product management consulting, you need to know your clients’ goals.
Without knowing what objectives your company is aiming to achieve, you can neither develop the right product nor market it the right way. Think of your product as an extension of your brand.
A good understanding of your company’s business objectives is one of the core product management secrets you should know.
A budding ecommerce business, for instance, will have different objectives than a healthcare or software company. As a result, their products will vastly vary too.
And this knowledge is greatly important as it’ll help you understand who your ideal customers are, what pain points your product should address, and how to measure your overall success.
2. Anticipate What the Future May Hold
This one’s pretty much an open secret when it comes to product and service management. You need to be forward thinking to ensure that your product service survives the continuously changing preferences of consumers.
As much as you focus on the demands of today, you should always keep an eye on what the future may throw at you.
A live example is before our eyes. The video conferencing platforms that foresaw the needs of the customers during the pandemic and designed their products accordingly, tasted great success.
Millions of users readily accepted what Zoom alternatives such as Google Meet, MS Teams, and others had to offer. And they continue to innovate to keep up with consumer demand.
Image via Zoom
A good idea here is to always have an ear to the ground to understand what your consumers are looking for.
3. Focus on Your Product’s Value
If you were to talk about your product in just a few lines, what would you highlight? Its features or the value it brings to the user?
As a product manager, your focus should always be on identifying customer needs and problems and how best your product can be equipped to meet those needs.
When you highlight the value of a product, your customers would instantly notice that the product can help them. Let’s say your company is into Shopify development. In this case, your product’s value would be a well-designed website that delivers great customer experience.
If you focus on this value, your features will come along with it effortlessly.
4. Test Your Product First-hand
This one’s a digital product management secret related to the product development and testing phase. Before you launch a product, it’s important to try it out yourself and ensure your pitch deck effectively communicates its value.
When I say try, it involves a lot more than just using the product.
I mean, you should put yourself in your customer’s shoes and test every feature and see if it delivers the value it’s meant to.
Let’s say, you’ve developed a CPQ solution.
You should try the platform out by generating quotes and analyze your experience of going through the process. Based on that, figure out if it:
- Serves the purpose
- Works smoothly
- Has any scope of improvement
- Has any glitches or bugs
- Can be simplified further
This exercise is vital not only to spot the glitches or flaws in your product but also to refine it to deliver a better user experience with successive versions.
As an integral part of the product management consulting process, this activity can save you huge money and set your product up for better sales.
5. Strike a Balance Between All Teams
As you explore the secrets of product management, here’s the next one that can help you become an effective leader.
As a product manager, you regularly coordinate with various teams, right from product development to testing, finance, marketing, sales, analysts, and many more.
The secret to successfully coordinating with these teams is to understand your role in each one of them. There’s a risk of you overdoing things and unintentionally interfering in their workflow. That’s why it’s important to strike a balance and be available in the entire product management process whenever and wherever required.
6. Always Be Ready to Learn
As a product manager, it’s extremely important that you keep learning regularly. It’s the only way through which you can innovate and bring in better features to your products.
Whom can you learn from?
Your customers, company owners and stakeholders, sales team, industry experts, and even the insights derived from digital marketing analytics. And if you’re offering product management services, this list would also include your clients.
All of these sources can give you valuable inputs into your product, which can help inform its further development. Listening to industry leaders can help you find new trends and gaps in the industry that you can fill with your product.
You can run an email campaign with an effective personalized template and reminder email to get feedback from the industry leaders and your most repeating client to get their feedback.
When you combine all this learning with the inputs of your teams, you will be able to set your products up for phenomenal success.
Are You Ready to Reap the Benefits of These Product Management Secrets?
Being a product manager is both challenging and exciting. And knowing the secrets of product management will put you in the driver’s seat, allowing you to create a foolproof roadmap for building successful products.
Go ahead and use these secrets to reshape your approach toward product management and pave your path to launching successful products one after another.
