Product manager as a position in a company: responsibilities and qualifications.
Functions of product manager. Product manager archetypes. Project managers and program managers. Archetypes of product managers: technologist, generalist, business-oriented. Product managers in different companies. Transitioning to product manager from different fields. Right experience for product manager. How to prepare resume.
Ideation and hypothesis development for products
Idea capture and handling system. Voice-of-Customer Methods: Ethnographic research, customer visit teams, customer focus groups, lead user (innovative user) analysis, the customer or user designs, customer brainstorming and inverse brainstorming, customer advisory board or panel, community of enthusiasts. Strategic methods for generating ideas: disruptions in market, core competencies assessment, peripheral vision, competitive analysis. Open innovation methods: partners and vendors, accessing the external technical community, scanning small businesses and business start-ups, external product designs, external submission of ideas, external idea contest. Technology development and fundamental research. Patent mapping. New knowledge as a source of innovation. Tapping the ideas of customers. Learning from lead users. Empathetic design. Invention factories and skunkworks. Open market innovation. The role of mental preparation. How management can encourage idea generation. Idea-generating techniques. Brainstorming. Nominal Group Technique. TRIZ. Catchball.
Product management life cycle model and product master plan
General product management life cycle model: discovery and innovation, new product planning phases, new product introduction phases (execution), post-launch product management. The basic construction of the product master plan: product and product line business documents, strategic plans, business cases, product requirements documents (PRDs), product roadmaps, product launch plans, marketing plans created for the product, product discontinuation plans, functional support plans (FSPs), marketing FSP, product development FSP, finance FSP, sales FSP, supply chain FSP, customer service FSP, legal and regulatory FSP, operations FSP.
Market analytics and voice-of-customer for product manager
Information customers cannot provide. Information customers can provide. Techniques for deeply understanding customer needs. Qualitative methods for deeper understanding: ethnography, netnography, site visits and individual interviews, lead users, customer toolkits, real-time market validation. The market analytics process. Types of customer data. Market analytics tool: segmentation, data mining, perceptual mapping, needs ranking, concept testing, conjoint analysis. Web-based market analytics.
Design thinking in product management
What “design thinking” is. How to apply design thinking in organization. “Design thinking” and the “knowledge funnel”. “Analytical thinking” and “intuitive thinking”. “Abductive logic” Automated Stage-Gate systems. Common errors in designing a next-generation stage-gate system.and “logical leaps of the mind.” Characteristics of exploration and explotation. Stanford’s design thinking approach.
Finance and forecasting for the product manager
Financial planning for product managers. Creating business cases for product investments. Testing planning assumptions using sensitivity analysis. Product cost models: standard costing, target costing, activity-based costing. Establishing pricing models. Preparing product budgets. Maturity assessment. Forecasts during the new product development process. Forecasting techniques: jury of executive opinion, scenario analysis, Delphi method, decision trees, assumption-based modeling, trend line analysis, moving average, exponential smoothing techniques, looks-like analysis (analogous forecasting), diffusion models, autoregressive moving average (ARMA)/autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, linear regression, nonlinear regression, logistic regression, event modeling, expert systems, neural networks, simulation, concept testing, product use testing, market testing, pre-market testing.
Stage-gate model to design new product development process.
An overview of Stage-Gate system: discovery, scoping, build the business case, development, testing and validation, go to launch, launch, post-launch review. Types of products which Stage-Gate system can handle. The Structure of the Stage-Gate system. What Stage-Gate is not. Agile Stage-Gate: hybrid model. Stage-Gate for "open innovation".
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