LITMIR.BIZ

      The marketing role includes generating customer demand, helping product marketing and sales respond to competitive moves, taking care of public relations, planning events, and creating material that supports the sales force and channel. You’ll spend many productive and thought-provoking hours with marketing.

       Legal

      Your involvement with the legal department depends on the type of industry you serve. If you’re in the insurance or medical fields, legal is highly involved with your product specifications. For many product managers, legal only gets involved whenever the company is making a contract with an outside party. For most products, your legal department needs to vet any kind of binding or implied promise made to a customer, partner, contractor, or third-party vendor.

       Product development

      Product development or, as it is sometimes called, engineering, is the organization that creates your product. Many specialties fall under this one title, including (but certainly not limited to) the following categories:

      Your relationship with product development is key to your success as a product manager. The product development people translate the customer problems that you define into real products that address those needs. How well they do depends on your ability to clearly explain what customers have told you into something that product development can act on. The quality of your communication and influencing skills is critical in making sure that you’re heard well.

      One issue that arises is how much direction you provide them. Engineers like to solve problems quickly. In many instances, you want to thoroughly discuss what the customer’s problems and needs are while the engineers want to quickly get to a solution. Your job is to keep them in the problem space long enough so that they really flesh out the ins and outs of the customer problem. Once you believe that everyone on the team has fully understood the customer problem, you can use mind maps and other tools to work through possible solutions. Engineers take the lead once the search for a solution is underway.

       Finance

      Finance is really focused on keeping the numbers straight and making sure the company is making more than it spends. You work with this department on the following topics:

       Operations

      Operations ensures that your product actually reaches your customer with as few hurdles to overcome as possible. You want the process to be friction-free because each hurdle is another opportunity for the sale to stop. The operations department is in charge of mapping out each step, and you need to convince them to implement as simple a process as possible so that your customers can easily buy your product. You may also need to bring in product development to make sure your customer’s journey is mapped out into as few steps as possible.

      Here are a couple of examples of ways in which having operations working with development improved customer experiences:

      Working with operations is detailed work. You must be prepared to sort out any of the following:

      Each company has its own way of setting up internal systems and processes so that the company runs properly. You need to understand the details of how these systems intersect with your goal of getting products in the hands of customers. In the end, it’s rewarding work to get right, and your operations people will love you for spending the time to get all the details done correctly.

       Service and support

      Service and support are the unsung heroes of your success. Much like sales engineers, service and support people hear directly from customers – and mostly from unhappy customers (it is rare that customers contact support to tell them how pleased they are.) They provide the after-sales support that keeps your customers satisfied as they use your product. As a product management your interactions with service and support happen for three main reasons: