Product Manager

The product manager should be one of the more straightforward roles in helping an organization drive business agility. Since they are directly accountable for the success of their products, the tools and solutions they require are directly linked to the strategic success of the entire organization.

KEY CHALLENGES:

• Integrating the voice of the customer. It can be a challenge capturing all the variables that contribute to the voice of the customer. But doing so helps ensure the organization is investing in the right things at the right time, implemented in the right way. Project managers often lack the ability to validate those decisions, which in turn makes it very difficult to adjust and adapt product plans in real time as customers shift and evolve their requirements.

• Aligning capital planning with financial performance. Determining which initiatives to fund can be extremely difficult when there is no mechanism or process for ensuring that those decisions are aligned with strategy. Investments must be identified and approved from the top-down based on their alignment with those priorities and their ability to contribute as identified in the business case. Investment owners must be able to further allocate funds where needed within their accountabilities.

• Lack of effective roadmapping capabilities. Roadmaps enable product managers to develop and manage a strategic view of the entire portfolio, both now and through future plans. These tools are critical in order to commercialize new products as quickly as possible without compromising quality. But many product managers lack the contextualized status reporting that helps capture variances from those roadmaps and analyze the implications of those variances across each individual product and the entire portfolio.