Product Description
The essential guide to seamless product management for today’s fluid, unpredictable business world
Long considered the most useful and insightful guide of its kind, The Product Manager’s Handbook has been fully revised and updated to give you the edge in today’s challenging business landscape. It features expanded coverage of product development processes, intelligence-gathering techniques (including social media), and a greater emphasis on international issues.
This indispensable resource proves that the techniques and tools product managers use are similar—regardless of what industry they work in and what kind of products they manage. Simply put, this book has everything you need for superior job performance—whether you manage consumer or business-to-business products created by an organization that is hierarchical or horizontal.
The Product Manager’s Handbook shows you how to integrate your organization’s disparate segments into a cooperative, results-focused unit that produces satisfying products—from initial design through the postpurchase experience. If your job is to create and commercialize products, it provides the information you need to:
- Balance breakthroughs and line extensions
- Create business cases—including competitive assessment, market requirements, and risk reduction
- Conduct gate reviews and beta testing and manage scope creep
- Get everything in order for a smooth product launch
For those who manage existing lines, this guide provides:
- Specific tips for each of the 4Rs of product life-cycle management
- Brand guidelines
- Approaches to customer message management
- Advice on working with sales and the channel
Clear, easy-to-read charts show you how to manage each crucial step from conception to completion, and practical checklists help you evaluate progress at every stage. Interviews with seasoned product management consultants and top-performing product managers provide you with dynamic, proven strategies for addressing potential problems in marketing, production, cross-cultural communication, and more.
The Product Manager’s Handbook examines current market-leading companies, the latest research findings, and evolving customer perceptions to provide you with the tools you need to design, produce, and market winning products—and beat the competition at every turn.
From the Back Cover
The Product Manager's Handbook is the essential guide to successful product management in today's fast-changing business world. Product and brand managers, as well as upper-level sales, marketing, and branding executives, will find the text thorough and informative as it explains and analyzes the product manager's role in both traditional, hierarchical organizations as well as in newer horizontal, team-driven decision-making structures.
What is a product manager? The overall responsibility of a product manager is to integrate the various segments of a business into a strategically focused whole, maximizing the value of a product by coordinating the production of an offering with an understanding of market needs. A product manager must oversee all aspects of a product or service line in order to create and deliver superior customer satisfaction while simultaneously providing long-term value for the company.
The Product Manager's Handbook covers all of these topics in a convenient, easy-to-follow presentation that includes:
-Hands-on charts for managing every key step, from concept to completion
-Practical checklists for evaluating progress at every critical stage
-Brief profiles in every chapter of specific product management roles, functions, and issues
-Real-world cases illustrating the challenges of product management in action
This thoroughly revised and updated second edition fully integrates the Internet and other digital technologies into the product manager's arsenal of tools. The book includes all new information on what it takes to be a successful product manager. It explains the product manager's role in the planning process (including strategic and operational planning), how to evaluate product portfolios, how to propose and develop successful new products, and more.
The product manager is frequently the source of the entrepreneurial spirit and sense of innovation that drives a successful organization. Learn to make the most of your product management system with this indispensable reference guide.
