The Role of Product Management in Organizational Success

by Parul Sharma

Product management (PM) plays a pivotal role in the operational success of a business. It aligns product development with a range of critical factors, including customer needs, revenue growth, market trends, and company goals. This alignment is key to maintaining a competitive edge, reducing time to market, improving customer satisfaction, fostering innovation, and optimizing resource allocation. Organizations that prioritize and invest in product management capabilities are better positioned to achieve their business objectives and sustain long-term competitiveness in the marketplace.

Steps to success

To maximize the effectiveness of PM, it’s essential for organizations to follow four steps: delineating roles, instilling an outside-in business model, leveraging automation, and learning to say “no.”

The first step is to identify and assign roles within PM in three distinct areas: Product management (PM), which focuses on understanding why it’s important to build or launch a product. Next is product development, which centers on how the products will be built. Then comes product operations. Product operations have become more prevalent in the last five to 10 years due to the emergence of software as a service (SaaS). This is the connective tissue—people, processes, and data—that binds product management development and ultimately holds the product together. It focuses on improving teams’ strategic, operational, and financial planning systems and processes.

 Once these roles are clear, the next step is for organizations to instill a company-wide “outside-in” business model, which entails putting customers’ needs first. An outside-in approach helps companies address the needs of multiple customers by developing one solution that will result in the best return on investment (ROI). This step is critical in guiding the product teams on how to best allocate their resources.

The third step is to integrate automation and other technologies to scale the product or feature to be launched. This is especially important once a business reaches beyond its customer base. By delivering and improving on the product, understanding the shifts in market demands and future customers is a bonus. Future customers are vital to the growth of businesses, and keeping track of what is happening in the market is crucial.

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult for companies, is learning to say ‘no’ to features that do not add sufficient customer value or create a business ROI. This decision is crucial for focusing resources on features that offer the most significant benefits. For instance, if a company is developing a budgeting app designed to help users track expenses and save money, proposing a feature for advanced investment analysis might be appealing but could divert resources from improving core functionalities like budget tracking and expense categorization. If the advanced investment feature does not directly enhance the primary value the app provides to its users or does not significantly contribute to the business’s ROI, it would be prudent to decline it. Saying ‘no’ ensures that development efforts remain concentrated on features that directly impact customer satisfaction and business goals, maximizing the product’s success and profitability.

The role of PM in product success

One strategy to ensure the operational success of a product is for companies to help product managers collaborate cross-functionally to articulate customer and business value to every stakeholder. Continuous communication is vital at all phases—conceptualization, planning, strategy, development, and growth—because downstream teams are equally responsible for the operational success of the end-to-end product from conception to launch.

One company that has launched into the stratosphere by understanding how to leverage accelerates development and growth by encouraging cross-departmental PM collaboration is ByteDance. Perhaps best known to most users for its TikTok platform, it had 1.9 billion monthly active users in 150 countries in 2021 and brought in $58 billion in revenues. ByteDance PM teams are divided by specialty, including technology, operations, content, analytics, and sales.

To avoid setbacks and failures, it’s advisable for product managers to do more than simply update stakeholders in quarterly business or product reviews. Regular newsletters, updates, customer interviews, and forums can bring teams together and keep them current with product plans, delivery dates, and launch plans. Additionally, product managers need to have a seat at the C-suite’s table when it comes to setting product direction and budget.

Leveraging market research

 Market research is a crucial element of the outside-in business model and informs decisions throughout the entire product lifecycle. Successful product managers understand the importance of leveraging market research at various stages of a product’s lifecycle, frominitiating and conceptualizing a product’s idea to validating it and undertaking competitive analysis. Once the company has committed to investing in a product based on market research, product managers can better strategize the product’s lifecycle by using additional research to better understand user persona, target audiences, and market segmentation.

 Upon reaching the product development and design stage, market research can be used to assess and develop a user-centric design and prioritize features. In the testing and validation stage, market research is used to conduct A/B testing to help bridge the gap, if any, between a company’s actual results and the research conducted. Once the product is ready for launch, market research—in the form of heat maps based on existing databases—can help teams effectively design and create a company’s marketing and pricing strategy.

Leveraging new technologies to augment product growth

The onset of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its integration into product management helps streamline the PM process. GenAI helps uncover inefficiencies in product development and, with proper training, can undertake repeatable processes, resulting in fewer internal errors. That, in turn, reduces the time to market for product launches or enhancements.

GenAI has also proven itself in terms of customer value through interactive methods such as chatbots for product support. GenAI saves the customer time and effort and enhances the overall customer experience with real-time responses and efficient problem resolution. For example, in the entertainment sector, Netflix and Amazon Prime use recommendation engines to recommend relevant products, content, and services to consumers.

According to Product Plan’s 2024 State of Product Management Report, in 2023, AI went from a curiosity to a business essential. Over 50 percent of respondents identified their first AI use case, while 19 percent said they used it in multiple places. AI can also advance dynamic pricing by adjusting prices in real time based on market conditions, customer behavior, and competitor offerings for a range of products to yield more profit. AI’s predictive analytics can forecast product demands and, along with machine learning apps, foresee market trends, spot new possibilities, and comprehend risks.

Preparing for the future

Effective PM is about far more than delivering new products and features. It’s instrumental in driving organizational growth and creating strategic competitive advantages. Product-led and customer-centric growth requires the integration of PM with the company’s overall roadmap, vision, and shared strategy for delivering value to customers.

 Companies can remain competitive by putting the customer first through various technologies, including GenAI, AI, and ML. Used judiciously and with the proper security and data privacy protocols, these new technologies will be an advantage to product managers as they help product teams analyze data, customer feedback, and market use. This outside-in business model will enable them to prioritize and influence their roadmap decisions in a much more data-centric fashion and, above all, drive the innovation that will keep their companies competitive.

About the Author:

Parul Sharma is the director of product management for NetApp, a hybrid cloud intelligent data services and data management organization. She has more than 17 years of experience leading multi-national teams, enterprise-wide business process transformation initiatives, and products and programs across high-profile oil, gas, manufacturing, and technology companies. Parul specializes in building and launching products, developing strategic business plans, managing large organizations, and customer experience. Connect with Parul on LinkedIn.