Background
In today's evolving industrial landscape, effective Product Management (PM) is paramount to the success of companies. Industrial companies face unique challenges and opportunities that require a strategic approach to managing the product portfolios.
Product Management is often seen in the light of a specific topic. Much has been written on digital PM, and for industrial companies the focus tends to be limited to e.g., supply chain with a focus on Product Lifecycle Management or R&D with a focus on New Product Development.
In these pages we aim to cover Product Management for industrial companies in its entirety to give some perspectives to the opportunities and challenges we have seen when investigating industrial companies in the Nordics.
Key Takeaways
Product Management is crucial to an organization, requiring active stakeholder engagement to maintain the right focus at the right time.
Key trends
Servitization, digitization, modularization, and sustainability are reshaping Product Management. It must be considered how to integrate management of services and digital products. While also being deliberate about how much to prioritize sustainability and designing for modularity.
The role of Product Management
Product Management has touchpoints to every aspect of the organization and should – ideally – be placed centrally to enable balancing inputs from R&D and Sales. The scope of Product Management typically includes Product portfolio steering, product strategizing, market & customer analysis, lifecycle management & new product introductions.
Navigating priorities
Product Managers must balance KPIs to ensure focus does not become one dimensional. Product Management often needs to deal with conflicting KPIs to ensure a constant balance between what to prioritize for each case.
Best practices
For industrial B2B companies five best practices are:
- Integrate roadmaps into the budgeting process to create commitment.
- Define the organizations operating model based on product characteristics.
- Embed sustainability targets and make Product Management the front-runner of sustainability.
- Develop clear product strategies in alignment with business strategies.
- Focus on sound Product Master Data Management to enable digitization and Digital Twins.
Interested?
Has the topic sparked your interest, then please continue reading our short 5-page report, which can be downloaded using the button on this page, or feel free to reach out.
