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| Clothing Shop Photo by Cull & Nguyen on Unsplash |
Product management - what used to be a function unique to technology companies is expanding to many other industries. The purpose of the role, put simply, is to understand customer needs and then translate those needs into product requirements that the development teams then go build. Ideally, it's done in an agile, iterative fashion with lots of feedback on the product from actual users. But I’ve noticed that product managers, mostly in the B2B world and mostly with technical backgrounds, tend to struggle with value - creating value for the customer, and creating value for their own company. Two separate, but related issues that I’ll discuss in two different posts.
First, creating value for customers. Unlike consumers, who are almost always both user and buyer, and are fairly easy to connect with for a representative sample to inform your product design, businesses almost always have two separate constituents - users and decision makers - with somewhat different goals or needs.
In order to get users to adopt your product, it needs to solve their problems or help them accomplish their day-to-day job goals. In order to get decision makers to buy your product for the users to use, it needs to help them accomplish business goals, and just saving money is often not enough these days.
Product managers need to get out of the office and talk to users to understand their day-to-day tasks and goals, and then identify product features that help them achieve what they need to achieve. Visiting and observing users doing their day-to-day work with a designer can be effective in developing this understanding.
But product managers also need to talk to decision makers and understand their business objectives. This is often where product managers fail the most. Understanding the business objectives, product managers need to prioritize features that both meet user needs, but also help the customer achieve it’s objectives - increasing customer retention, increasing deposits, reducing product returns, improving security and reducing incidents, and sometimes reduced cost or better efficiency.
Being able to draw the line to both user and customer business value is a crucial skill for successful B2B product managers. And it starts with talking to and understanding all your customer constituents.
Denver, Colorado-based professional Killen Herring is currently working as the business strategy leader at Broadcom Inc., a company that provides semiconductors and infrastructure software solutions. Killen Herring specializes in portfolio analysis, portfolio management, and business strategy, and also pursues many hobbies such as soccer, photography, and golf in his leisure time.
