Curating your product management process
How do manufacturers keep product management evangelists engaged after product launch?
If we consider Concurrent’s recent survey results, cultivated from over 70 outdoor and specialty companies, the typical product management team size is between 1-5 members and they take 12-24 months to get a new product concept to market. Over 20% reported internal processes as their most difficult daily challenge and 25% reported having too much to do.
Another survey of 600 companies and over 1,000 respondents from productfocus.com suggests that just under half of a product manager’s time is spent on unplanned fire-fighting activities. That survey also reported that a person stays in their product management role an average of 3 years and that businesses spread resources so thinly that many initiatives fail.
People in product development report spending 47% of time spent on unplanned fire-fighting activities!
In other words, just after the company launches a product into the market, it will lose several experienced and valued team players. Those knowledge sources won’t be around for the next product cycle. These stats leave one to wonder if product manufacturers are achieving full value out of their product management teams or are they burning their human resource energy on continuous hiring, onboarding, and training.
‘Isn’t it time to address your product development process?’
What are your next steps?
Support the growing knowledge base of product development in specialty markets and take the PM in Specialty Markets Survey and share this link with your product management friends.
Updated survey results that span comparable product management team structure, responsibilities, and challenges will be emailed to all Concurrent survey participants in April 2018.
Then, send us a contact request to have Concurrent create a customized survey that captures your internal team’s feedback, and:
- Clarifies your NPD process and makes it understandable to all participants
- Fine tunes the level of process detail you need to track
- Identifies gate or milestone expectations
- Identifies team roles and accountabilities
- Improves the overall value of team participants
- Optimizes the team composition
- Identifies challenges and their solutions to your current product process
- Simplifies onboarding for new team players
- Improves downstream handoffs