Mistakes in Product Management
It is estimated that on average 30,000 new products hit the market each year. Unfortunately not all new products are successful. In fact, around 5% of products turn out to be successful. Yes, 95% of new products fail. In addition to this, 1 out of 5 products fail to meet the end-user’s needs. This means you are putting your product at a 20% risk of failure right off the bat by not understanding your user. Successful product management operations can lead to maximizing the value of a product as well as optimizing organizational efficiency.
Below we will cover some key mistakes in product management so you can avoid these costly mistakes in your organization's product development process.
No Product Vision or Clear Goals
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it happens very often in product development initiatives. We all enjoy building and moving fast, but it is important to prioritize tasks and goals effectively. Teams too often fall into the trap of beginning development efforts without fully understanding their end-user and/or target market.
Not Involving the Right People at The Right Time
Product management is aimed at making an organization more efficient during their development processes. Effective cross department collaboration is key to hitting deadlines and key targets for your product. But, it can be difficult to align departments and involve the right team at the right time. Establishing a vision and clear goals for your product can provide guidance in creating your product roadmap, which will allow you to plan what team members will be needed at the specific stages of the development cycle. This allows every team member's time to be utilized effectively as well as not having too many cooks in the kitchen.
Building To Much To Soon
Prioritizing development efforts can help in optimizing your development spend throughout your product’s lifecycle. It is crucial to gain feedback and insights from your target audience as you continue to make iterations on your product. Creating an MVP allows you to create just enough usable features that can be tested by your early users. In building “just enough” you are able to spend less and get your product into the hands of customers to gain valuable feedback that will guide you in your next development cycle.
Adding Features Instead of Addressing the Problem at Hand
Testing your user experience and analyzing the results can be a great way to make product adjustments. But, some development teams tend to believe that adding an additional feature will solve their usability problems. This in turn can create a “busy” product with redundant features added which can ultimately lead to increased user churn and decreased revenue. For example, testing your users could lead you to find that a simple call-to-action switch can fix the bounce rate issue that you were experiencing.
Misalignment During Product Execution
Effective collaboration across departments can make an organization operate with increased efficiency as well as experience less mistakes, thus save money in the long run. In the product development cycle it can be difficult at times to have strong communication across departments due to the on-going efforts that go into building a successful digital product. To fix this, it is important to develop clear communication objectives and priorities among the team. For example, many teams do weekly stand-ups to align thoughts and solve pressing issues.
Building Successful Digital Products
An effective product management team can fuel consistent success across your organization's development efforts. Establishing KPI's within a product management team can be powerful in evaluating user satisfaction and product capabilities. Additionally, agile product development can provide a major advantage to teams due to the short development cycles and constant feedback guiding future product developments.
Building a custom product fit to your needs can create a desirable digital experience among users and increase engagement, as well as raving fans which lead to referrals. Codelitt enjoys helping companies create and build better digital product experiences. We are obsessed with the problem and using innovation to make products easier for the end-user. If you have a project or idea in mind we’d love to hear from you! Contact us here.