Managing Products & Services
Product Management, according to PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association, is defined as:Ensuring over time that a product or service profitably meets the needs of customers by continually monitoring and modifying the elements of the marketing mix, including: the product and its features, the communications strategy, distribution channels and price.Product Management becomes Business Development when new markets can be tackled with existing products or services. It is here, that true revolutionary growth of a business is possible and achievable: An entire marketing dimension can be added without impacting the production engine of a business — these activities focus on sales and marketing, spearheaded by the Product Manager.
Variation of Fast-Track based on the
Stage-Gate™ model by Robert G. Cooper
The Stage-Gate™ Approach to New Product
Development, as described by Robert
G. Cooper in his excellent book "Winning
at New Products" (Perseus Publishing, Third
Edition) is a straight-forward method to manage the
product life cycle, from idea inception to market
retirement. Stage-Gate™ can be adapted to any
company size — the document overhead for the
process can be minimal, yet it allows to make
committed decisions and define realistic targets for
products and product lines.
Stage-Gate™ model by Robert G. Cooper