Driving Competitive Advantage Through Innovation, Adaptive Application of Best Practices, and Organizational Transformation

Building the right product, building it right and building it fast are all important aspects of organizational success. Needless to say, it all begins and ends with the customer, and product management is at the heart of it! Shooting at everything that moves with no clear prioritization strategy that cuts through the noise is the shortest path to failure. For organizations to become more competitive in today’s market, they must realize the importance of product management as a differentiating capability (not just as a function). This means adopting disciplined product management functional excellence and best practices to enable organizational transformation in all aspects including the strategy, execution, and process implementation.

To do so, there are generally four pillars of product management that are well-established but need to be reinforced when it comes to implementation. These include (1) customer-driven innovation by implement product-first decision-making processes, with a maniacal focus on the customer that buys and uses the product, (2) leadership responsibility by creating a cadence of accountability that starts and ends with the product managers but permeates through the whole organization, (3) performance accountability by enabling financial transparency down to the product level, and (4) decision making authority where product managers become the focal point of interactions by elevating them to a cross-functional role and giving them the authority to make decisions about timing of innovations, pricing, channel strategy, and everything else that affect the success of their product. This presentation will provide a framework for how to successfully implement these four important aspects to drive innovation and transformation.