Product Management

Everything you will ever need to know about Product Management

New to Product Management?

Experienced product manager just wanting to reaffirm your knowledge?
Business Owner discovering whether Product Management is a hole you need to fill in your business?

Whatever your circumstances, this article is your ‘one-stop-shop’ for everything to do with Product Management.

We will cover various topics within this area including the basics, and moving forward into more actionable sections which will help you strategise Product Management moving forward as well as real-life examples of how we’ve developed Product Management strategies for our clients.

What is product management?

“Product management is an organisational function within a company dealing with new product development, business justification, planning, verification, forecasting, pricing, product launch, and marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.”

In essence, Product Management is the management of your products across your service range. Simple; right?

As the proper definition illudes to, Product Management isn’t that simple. Product Management is a very fluid function across a business, juggling both sales and marketing tasks alongside the profitability of the product in question. It’s an end-to-end process to ensure new products launch successfully, generate sufficient interest and can be optimised going forward.

Alongside that, Product Management is creating business cases for new products coming into the business. This means this function also involves a certain level of market and interest analysis for the business.

See, not quite as simple as it first seems.

Just to emphasise how fluid Product Management is as a function, according to Pragmatic Marketing, just 28% said that they spent any time strategising. Retrospectively, 72% of their time was spent on tactics and execution.

In essence, Product Management is more that just ‘managing a product’.

It’s about the planning, execution and optimising the processes around the product, whilst ensuring that all parties are pulling together to fuel the profitability of the asset.

How can product management be integrated with Sales and Marketing?

There’s a common misconception that Product Management acts as a separate entity to the Sales and Marketing function. However, the real power in Product Management comes when all three are aligned together.

Alignment, in it’s purest form, is something that all businesses should be aiming to achieve due to the clear benefits of everyone pulling in the same direction. For example, organisations with aligned departments achieve up to 38% higher sales win rates. Therefore, aligning your Product Management teams can dramatically improve the performance of other departments.

As alluded to in the previous section, Product Management is so much more than just

Product Management vs Project Management

It’s common for people to confuse product managers and project managers — even within industries, such as Equipment Rental, that may employ both.

The common differentiator between the two is the focal point of the role. Whereas a project manager focuses on a specific goal or KPI (e.g. Improving Awareness, Authority, Ensuring a project is smooth), a Product Manager is focussed solely on the success of a product.

A big sticking point within the Construction industry is ensuring that all departments and parties are pulling together collaboratively for the growth of a business. A product manager enables this to occur, with everyone pulling together to ensure the profitability of the fleet/product.

However, with a clear synergy between the two roles, both roles can work alongside each other to ensure business functions surrounding the product runs smoothly. For example, Project managers must communicate project status and escalate when necessary to the various project stakeholders and Product Managers, as a result, need to ascertain the next steps forward to optimise the profitability of the product.

Here we have detailed a clear differentiation between the two roles below:

Product Management	Project Management
Market & Interest Analysis	Breaking down tasks
Setting out Product Vision	Planning timelines
Liaising with key stakeholders and decisions	Delegating tasks
Strategising Launch Plan	Monitoring task completions
Ideating a Product Roadmap	Looking over execution
Liaising with delivery team members	Communication to team

What’s the Product Management Process?

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What does a Product Manager do?

Creating a Product Management Strategy

Product teams and executives rarely have a process for evaluating the right strategy to build in the first place.

So if you’re responsible for developing a product strategy roadmap, you need a plan. This plan shouldn’t zap the creativity out of your thinking process but you should have some sort of defined approach.

If you’re working for an asset-based business or in the Equipment Hire industry, here’s what we recommend you implement as part of your product management strategy:

Product Life Cycle:
Product Pricing & Profitability
Product Innovation & Sustainability
Product Launch Process
Product Service Analysis
Fleet Assessment
Fleet Utilisation
Fleet Age Profile
Core Fleet Proposition
Fleet Disposal Process

Product Management Examples

Scenario 1: An asset based Construction company comes to us and has over 15 Assets in it’s fleet. However, only 3 are utilised at a high rate. They are wondering how to stop these assets working as hard, whilst increasing the utilisation rate of the rest of their fleet.

Solution: Understanding where the discrepancy resides in their fleet and identifying the low utilisation rate reason is the key here.

A Product Manager would, first of all, conduct a Asset Review and get an overview of the product range.

Scenario 2: An Equipment Rental company have an established fleet and have been servicing customers for a long time. However, the majority of their assets are nearing the 5-10 year mark and, as a result, their upkeep is becoming more expensive and time consuming. They’re keen to integrate the ‘Next Generation’ of assets but are unsure as to how to make this transition seamless.

Solution: When transitioning to the next generation of assets and innovation, it’s key to ensure that your service levels don’t drop for your existing customers and that you’re promoting your latest assets effectively to your prospective customers.

As a result, the product manager (or consultant) would have to ideate a clear Product Launch Strategy. This is primarily achieved through outreach and Marketing to ensure the newest assets have enough ‘airtime’ to generate interest and drive utilisation rates. Alongside this, they will have to manage the transition between the assets to ensure that no customer is left ‘short’ and without a rental throughout this period.

What is a Product Management Consultancy?

Has all this information about Product Management got you thinking about bringing someone on to manage your fleet? If so, how about you consider a Consultancy instead.

Basically, a Product Management Consultancy is a service that carries out all the functions of Product Management but in an external capacity. This is something we offer here at Next Level Consultancy.

We work primarily with the Equipment Hire Industry, and Asset based businesses, to enable you to act on data that will ultimately create consistency across your products and processes, improve efficiency across your fleet and deliver profitability to support growth. The Product Management function is closely connected to the Marketing Strategy and should also be customer informed before and after product investment. This is where working with the UK’s Leading Sales and Marketing focussed Consultancy for the Equipment Hire Industry will ensure your fleet is fit for purpose and utilisation is in line with your targets.

Currently, we have helped various Equipment Hire businesses expand their asset portfolio and launch them effectively whilst maintaining profitability and driving growth.

Interested in finding out more? Get in contact with us today.