Profitable Product Manager for Slow Down Time

The quest of every product manager and product management leader is to find the keys to highly performing, market leading products. Staying ahead in an environment characterized by rapid change (technology, global forces, corporate re-alignment) makes the task even more difficult.. Further to this, the desire to deliver superior product line performance is often obscured by day-to-day firefighting. This chaos is felt by product managers and marketers every day. These reactions materialize with technical, customer, sales & marketing problems and an endless series of interruptions. When looking at this objectively, and when analyzing product line and corporate performance, the root causes are invariably traced back to unclear product strategies and poorly executed tactical activities.Sequent Learning Networks continues to observe this behavior within its clients¿ environments. Our findings lead us to believe that if product management and marketing practitioners, and the teams they lead invested more purposefully in strategic and tactical planning, they would improve their overall efficiency as they execute (develop and launch), and manage current products.By having well-formulated, and more importantly, well-understood, actionable strategies, the entire organization becomes more efficient in its ability to both identify and prioritize product and marketing investments. Moreover, opportunities which emerge from the formulation of those strategies throughout the life cycle typically require investments of people and financial resources. Therefore, when product investments are considered, they should be evaluated against specific criteria using a phase-gate product development process, followed by an explicit investment justification for a new product, new market development, or enhancements are manifest in well documented Business Cases. These critical planning elements can serve to identify that which is necessary to execute more effectively, and to ward off the chaos and the frustration it breeds. This is the reason this workshop was developed.It is not intended to gloss over key planning issues. It is designed to serve as the ideal learning laboratory. The intensity and duration of the exercises serve to establish the important foundational elements of strategy, planning, development, launch, and post-launch. It clarifies the most important and critical linkages between product strategy formulation and tactical execution.The intensity of this hands-on, team-oriented, facilitated workshop puts strategic product and market planning into focus and on the front line by clearly describing and demonstrating how strategies are derived and put into action. The approach helps participants in understanding the current state of their product or products in the market, clarifying their purpose, defining a vision, and in synthesizing the derived data such that the resulting opportunities can be brought to light, analyzed and considered.