The discipline of product management (PM) has evolved into an increasingly popular one across businesses. Drawing on all three fields of marketing, design, and engineering, PM is essentially an interdisciplinary process that reaches across teams to design and plan in such a way that uninterruptedly brings better products to the market. Listed below are the important steps in the PM process:
Market study and portfolio: Firstly, depending on in-depth market and business analysis, marketing executives pass on the information to the business development team. An official market study takes place and a portfolio is built as per the research.
Appointment of product manager: Product managers play an integral role in any product-based companies. They are the ones who interact with clients and gather their requirements for the product to be made. The product manager is the single point of contact of the company with the client.
Contract signing: A contract is signed between the development company and the client.
Commencement of contract: Once the product manager brings all the requirements to the in-house team, the respective development and project teams are formed. Every engineering team will have a technical leader assigned and will be reporting to individual engineering managers. A project manager or project management office assigns a point of contact to the project who will be tracking the statuses and report the progress to the product manager.
Beginning the work: An office project begins once the teams have formed and have divided the responsibilities accordingly. The product manager is constantly in touch with both the development teams and the customer to keep everyone on the same page in terms of expectations and requirements. An intermittent progress report is shared with the customer as to how the team is progressing with building the product. If the client is concerned about the tools being used in the process of building the product, they will specify it during the contracts negotiation. The security and copyright of the product will be two major criteria for any releases as they will hold customer or project details.
Product clearing: Once the product is built, it would go through a rigorous process of clearing security requirements internally and then will be approved to release to the client or market in case of generic software.
Logistics: For the ordering process, a logistics team, such as supply chains and shipping teams, are set up after the product is ready for an official release. Once after the product is released, there will be regular upgrades and patches planned in order to keep the product up-to-date from the security and functionality perspective.
