How to Support Cross-Collaboration with Engineering Teams
It takes many people to design and develop an amazing product. Many companies with large complex hardware, software, or cyber physical products can have numerous teams working simultaneously and in tandem with each other to ensure the best model makes it to the market. Successful products happen when great minds and teams work together. While it’s easy to imagine that this collaboration happens organically, the reality is that teamwork needs to be fostered.
Capturing Your Customer's Needs and Turning them into Actionable Solutions for Prioritization
Your company has created a product your customers love, and your sales team and distributors can hardly keep up with the demand. While your team is basking in the launch's success, you also know that it's only a matter of time before the competition launches something new. Unless you also introduce a new feature, you may lose some of your customers. Your team needs to focus on idea generation and prioritization to stay competitive.
Feature Scoring in Product Development: When to Do It and Why
Choosing between two great options is a struggle for anyone. When faced with the decision, there can be a feeling of loss for the choices not selected. When it comes to ideas and group discussion, it can even feel personal. The more options thrown into the mix, the more challenging the decisions become.
Your Guide to Sharpening Scoring Skills & Reducing Bias
Product development teams are always eager to improve their products. This passion for the product and quest to make improvements leads to a flood of ideas pouring in on a regular basis. Naturally, everyone who submits an idea believes their suggestion is great and should be implemented. While their idea may be good, that doesn’t guarantee it’s the right idea to focus on next. Product development decisions need support from data and research.
Why Manufacturers Should Prioritize Cyber Security When Choosing a SaaS Provider
Manufacturing companies benefit from technological advances across their organizations. Technology simplifies tasks and task management from the factory floor to the design and development stages to company-wide correspondence. The prevalence of technology makes security one of their top concerns, and for good reason. Large manufacturing companies are a target for their intellectual property, sensitive customer and employee data, and money. Cyber threats are a real concern, from phishing scams that can target any employee, ransomware or data breaches resulting from vulnerable networks to supply chain disruptions.
How to Use Your Product Roadmap to Make Product Line Projections & Stay Aligned With Product Goals
It’s rare for a company to grow with a product that doesn’t change or innovate. There may be success and significant market share following a release date, but over time, that share and popularity will decrease as the competition continues to introduce new features, software upgrades, or improvements in design. The reality is that companies must continuously improve their products to keep and grow their market share.
What Characteristics Make An Effective Product Roadmap?
Product roadmaps are crucial for communicating the product vision, guiding product development, aligning development teams, and communicating with various stakeholders. The failure to use a product roadmap effectively will often lead to confusion, misalignment, and possible failure of the product. This article focuses on what makes a good product roadmap and how to use it to ensure success.
Navigating Product Initiative Approval: Agile vs. Stage-Gate
Developing a new product is a complex process that demands the cooperation of various product teams, the collection of resources, and a significant budget. But before development can begin, there needs to be a product plan and approval from senior executives.
How to Use Product Segmentation to Enter New Markets
Every product manager knows they must meet their target audience's needs to succeed. However, they also know that while consumers may ask for a laptop computer, not all their needs will be the same. For example, a customer who loves to play online games will value a powerful CPU and pay more for a smooth experience, while a college student majoring in the arts will value a lightweight model that doesn't add bulk to their stuffed bag. They only need their laptop for general use, and they will not pay more for additional speed or memory.
5 Mindset Shifts to Make When Adapting to Lean-Agile Approaches
With the increasing number of products introducing software components and the constant appetite for new customer features, many companies are looking to adopt Lean-Agile approaches for product development to stay competitive. Many resources out there help lead companies towards Lean-Agile approaches, such as the SAFe Framework, which helps companies of all sizes make Lean-Agile methods work for them, no matter the scale of production. But adopting any new method also requires a shift in mindset. Here are five mindset shifts to help product managers confidently make the switch.
Is a Product Roadmap Contrary to Agile Philosophy?
In the product development world, there are various opinions on Agile Philosophy. Should organizations use it? Does it work for manufacturing complex products? Is it scalable for large companies?
What Is Systems Engineering and Why Product Managers Need To Care
In today's technology-driven world, the products we use every day are an increasingly complex mix of software and hardware components. Developing these modern products requires multiple resources, including personnel and components, to build them; systems engineering is the process that brings these different resources together to create a finished product. Product managers must be in tune with systems engineering so they can navigate the many challenges of modern product development.