Product Management
Consulting and Contracting
A Product Management Consultant or Contractor can help your company bring world-class, customer-focused products to market faster. Product Management Consultants can do short or long-term projects such as customer and market research, product strategy, competitive analysis, market analysis, and writing MRDs (Market requirements documents). Product Management Contractors can come in and act as an interim employee, taking the place of staff that are on vacation, sabbaticals or maternity leave, or filling in if you don’t have full-time headcount to hire a permanent employee.
Some of the tasks that a Product Management Consultant or Product Management Contractor can perform for your company include:
Optimizing your product management function and process
- Define a process to meet your needs
- Optimize your current process
- Determination of best development processes (agile versus waterfall) given the organization and products
- Analyze and make recommendations for optimizing your current process
- Leverage 280 Group methodology to get you to a world-class process quickly
Market Analysis
- Identifying and sizing target markets
- Determining markets that are appropriate for your company’s unique talents
Customer and Market Research
- Customer research to determine critical needs required for your products
- “Quick and Dirty” surveys and customer interviews to rapidly and inexpensively validate ideas
- Market research through secondary research sources such as analyst firms and industry experts
Defining products based on customer needs
- Writing MRDs (Market Requirements Documents), PRDs (Product Requirements Documents) and defining products
- Giving engineering teams clear and concise information about customer needs
- Prioritizing feature sets into “Must Have”, Nice to Have” and “Next Release”
- Developing short-term and long-term product roadmaps
Product Roadmapping
- Capturing, analyzing and prioritizing all requirements
- Creating a multi-year release plan
- Using best practices such as “Themes” and Golden Features” to create a well thought out plan
Working with engineering teams
- Determining feature versus schedule tradeoffs
- Making difficult feature decisions
- Deciding whether products are ready for first customer ship
Managing beta customer sites
- Writing early customer success stories
- Gathering initial product feedback
- Securing early customer wins to validate additional financing
Competitive analysis
- Ensuring you have an accurate and non-biased picture of your competition
- Helping you determine whether to enter a market based on the current competitive environment
Shipping products
- Defining and managing all in-box components
- Creating product packaging
- Working with operations to create BOM and manufacturing plans