The evolving business landscape necessitates successful product launches and optimised product management lifecycles. Product managers drive innovation and customer needs, while a high-performing product team streamlines interactions, increasing efficiency and ensuring new products meet company standards.
If you want to contribute to the development of business technologies, new consumer goods and software platforms, then pursue a product management certification course. Read ahead to learn more about the product management lifecycle and the key steps of the effective product management process that can aid in the process of becoming a product manager. Apart from that you will also learn how you can implement them to help your company succeed.
What is Product Management?
Product management involves steering the product through all stages of its life cycle, including conception, development, positioning, and price, among others. Product managers are responsible for ensuring that a company's product strategy aligns with its business objectives.
Notably, as the world's reliance on technology grows, product management has emerged as one of the most sought-after job fields. Businesses are now looking for specialists that can not only provide the greatest viewpoints on items, but also ensure their success.
What is the Product Management Lifecycle?
The product management lifecycle comprises overseeing a product from conception to launch and beyond. It covers overseeing all parts of the product, such as development, design, marketing and sales.
It includes introducing new features and addressing issues to a current product, as well as providing customer service assistance.
Before we discuss product management lifestyle stages in detail, we must know there are four stages in the product life cycle — introduction, growth, maturity and decline. In the next section, the stages of how to manage the product lifecycle have been discussed.
Product Management Lifecycle Stages
These are can be broadly subdivided into seven main stages as follows:
- Generation of idea and its management: This is the first step and it involves generation of new and innovative ideas for the products/services by the product manager, followed by planning a course of action. Now, the ideas could be anything — our own experience, feedback from customers, market research, focus groups or customer needs. The next step focuses on key personas, key user stories and product roadmap to help the development team in prioritising and validating feature ideas.
- Market research and business analytics: After appropriate research and sharing of ideas by the product manager with various teams, there comes a requirement to identify the target market, end-users of the products and understand what are their actual requirements. Apart from that, primary research and secondary research need to be done to present the best product features in any future product. This will be followed by validation of user personas and user stories from different channels.
- Strategic planning: Here, this stage involves turning ideas into feature development and identifying the priorities and main features of the product. When statistical analysis is not enough, there comes a requirement to schedule regular meetings with all stakeholders — from upper management team to marketing teams and mechanical engineers. The product marketing manager then creates an external and internal roadmap with clear priorities and goal to reach the milestone.
- Prototyping: This is an important step as it encompasses creation of a mock-up of the product. Hence the team produces a prototype to test the product and gather feedback for the same. Prototyping entails removing all non-essential components and focusing on developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
- Validation: In this stage, the idea of the product is validated and checked if it is worth expanding the same. On the basis of customer reviews, surveys and interviews, the potential threats or issues are detected and worked upon. The product plan is then reviewed by the product team before proceeding with the product development life cycle.
- Delivery: This is the second last step in the product management lifecycle stages. Here, all of the foundation has been established for a successful product feature delivery. It also entails testing and refining the product until it satisfies the necessary quality standards before distributing it to clients who have already purchased or will purchase it in the future.
- Product launch: It helps to decide whether to launch the product in beta or wait until success is achieved. This allows room for testing various marketing strategies before the final launch. This stage also pays attention to the target audience, so as to deliver the appropriate message of the product.
How are Product Managers Responsible in the Process?
Product managers are responsible throughout every facet of the product management lifecycle. During the concept stage, they do market research, create a unique product idea, and promote it internally.
They need decision-maker assistance and development funds. They handle product marketing, launch, and product research and development to ensure the optimum user experience.
Product managers need tools to assist them manage the process. PLM software should enable a corporation to manage information and procedures at all stages of the product management lifecycle.
Conclusion
To become a new-age product manager, one should have a strong understanding of the modern product development process, product management lifecycle or how to manage the product lifecycle, which involves various stages such as ideation, research and analytics, planning and designing, development, prototyping, validation, launch and post-launch evaluation.
Additionally, new-age product managers should be well-versed with the latest digital technologies and tools, and be able to leverage data and analytics to drive product decisions.
Imarticus Learning’s new-age Product Management Certificate course, in collaboration with IIT, Roorkee aims to provide learners with a well-rounded education that will prepare them for a successful career in product management.
