| Highlights of Mitchell's Talk |
- The focus of Product Management has evolved to meet major market, geographic and customer trends including globalized supply chains, deeper and more extensive channel partnerships, shorter product life cycles and increasingly fragmented and fickle consumer needs.
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- Many consumer and industrial products companies now take more of a multi-product “category approach” as well as a “whole business delivery model” that assembles bundles of consumer value including products, after sales support and add-on services.
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- The Product Management skill set continues to be in high demand in non-traditional sectors (e.g., software, health care and financial services) that seek to bring a product management framework – marketing & promotion, consumer research, product development – to what once were viewed as separate, vertical tasks.
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- Successful Product Managers are generally very good at: 1) uncovering critical insights from the reams of online and off line data now available and 2) identifying and applying global best practices to local markets. Getting the right offering for the right price at the critical time remains the key task.
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- Some of the most important tools for product managers include: 1) sophisticated pricing and demand analysis that determines price elasticity of demand; 2) deep-dive qualitative consumer research that probes anthropology and behavioral psychology for purchase drivers and; 3) running project management offices that lead and coordinate the activities of multi-region, multi-partner, and cross-functional teams.
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- Product branding activities – naming, advertising, messaging - remain important tasks for Product Managers although they now most likely share strategic responsibility and execution with corporate marketing groups and senior management.
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- In organizations where governance and information rights are not clarified, maximizing the value of a Product Management approach will continue to be a work in progress. Getting this organizational structure right has been a challenge for many Companies.
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- Given the intellectual, leadership and inter-personal demands of the role, effective Product Managers will continue to be in short supply.
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