In the times to come, product management is going to become one of the most critical roles, while the entire focus is shifting to digitization and automation. The future of product management can be defined in three words; the product management role would firstly give scalability to the product, consistency to the product and predictability to the process. So wherever you are applying, if you follow your product management with these three principles, that’s what the future is going to be. However to achieve these three above mentioned principles the future is going to be dependent upon some key trends.
Foremost, the entire decision making of product management is going to become more and more data driven, layered with components like subjectivity, intelligence and experience. However the strongest underlying factor will be data and here one needs to understand that interpretation of data in itself is a challenge. Data can be interpreted in multiple ways and here the element of subjectivity will come into play as to how one interprets and decodes data.
Second trend that has always been there but more and more relevant and important now, is the customer centric approach, the customer has to always be at the center. In principle everyone knows this but in practicality it isn’t followed as it should be. One needs to think like the customer, be the customer, do research with the customer, and take constant feedback from the customer; it goes beyond thinking like a customer and permeates into a lot of depth.
Thirdly, product management is going to move more and more towards iterative development. It will be more and more agile and dynamic. One can’t create something for a period of two years and forget about it. The entire development has to be in an agile and iterative mode because the product is changing at a very fast pace. If you are looking at the data too much and following the customer sensitivity approach, both customer and data will provide you with many insights. So product strategy needs to be looked at very often and changed very often resulting in a flexible and malleable development.
The fourth and biggest trend in times to come will be the impact being mapped to product development. What is the impact that you are driving? The product managers have to have a very sharp focus on the impact. In Bada Business it is clearly observed what impact the product brings to the business goals in conjunction with the business.
This will be followed by another critical piece which is the cross functional collaboration. The product managers have to be brought in very close proximity to the business teams to ensure that whatever they are thinking and doing is being executed in the same manner. Also for them to identify the execution level challenges because a perfect strategy means nothing when the execution is full of pitfalls.
Lastly, the integration of AI, generative AI, NMP into our entire program, to make sure that we are leveraging technology to transform our products.
Contributed by Gyan Gupta, Product Evangelist, Bada Business
