Author: Linda Gorchels
Publisher: McGraw-Hill – 392 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
A product manager’s job is not just to help create good products for a company to sell but to deliver superior satisfaction to customers: the users of the products, the author Linda Gorchels points out.
In a typical company that supplies products to consumers, there are product developers on the one hand and there are product marketers and sellers on the other. The product manager’s position is somewhere in between development and marketing-selling
The product manager’s function is a critical one of communication with both the designers, engineers and plants of factories of a company (the upstream components) and the marketing, advertising and sales people (the downstream teams).
Gorchels states that while a company’s engineers and designers may have the knowledge to provide answers to whether a product can be built, it is the product manager who can provide insight – based on data from and knowledge of customers – whether a product should be built. The stories of products, ranging from huge successes to dismal failures, are her guide to decisions or recommendations to top management.
Decisions on whether or not to create a product and offer it in the market to test its acceptance and sales sustainability can be important ones. The cost of creating a new product can be quite high, but keep in mind that not creating it can also turn out to be a lost opportunity to increase revenues, and this would be a costly mistake.
From my view the product manager’s role is so important that it can make or break a company, especially if top management is not watching how its products are doing both in the developmental stage and on sales platforms.
Products are the very core and source of income for a company that does not sell services, and the product manager can be a catalyst to determine the financial success or failure of a company, especially if all or most of its sales come from just one or a handful of products.
The first edition of this book that came out about 15 years ago covered the basic scope of product management and the key concepts in this area of study in business schools. But two later editions before this current one added important new knowledge and during this period the scope of product management as a discipline expanded, the author points out.
She explains that the study of product management evolved from being a “fill-in-the-blank, step-by-step process” into one that requires “executive, strategic thinking skills” even though there are still “templates and tips.” There is more emphasis now on the “why” in product management courses offered at the university level because there are so many variables that can change the outcome of a new product launch as well as the ongoing revenue stream of a product already on the market.
Linda Gorchells is part of the executive education faculty of the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She has provided training courses to employees at Metro Automation, Nokia and Siemens, among other firms. She has authored or coauthored several other books including The Product Manager’s Field Guide and The Manager’s Guide to Distribution Channels.
This book is written for product managers and others responsible for making or helping make decisions on what new products to create, add to existing product lines, or discontinue them, especially if a thorough cost-benefit analysis points to this decision.
The book helps them assess competitors’ products in relation to their own in terms of similarities and differences, market share, pricing, their own company’s revenue share from a particular product, as well as its profitability share, and other considerations.
With the product manager being a key decision- maker – or at least a decision influencer if top management wills it so – his or her burden is very heavy. Gorchels says however that most product managers have had no formal training in making decisions.
So she provides in the book a decision-making model that they can use. This is one of the most important values of this book, in my opinion. But it has much more that empowers product managers to be effective in achieving company goals, and themselves becoming large contributors to the company’s growth.
Product managers not only influence other people in their company to make certain decisions, but are also influenced by people within and outside their workplace. Some of the departments in the company that influence their decisions are customer service, engineering, finance, legal, manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, research, sales and top management.
Outside their companies, product managers are influenced by ad agencies, competitors (local and overseas), consumers, distributors, mass media, retailers, wholesalers, and others. So there is so much – often conflicting – input hey are subject to, making their job not an easy one.
Product managers interact with these and other entities. Which of them are they in contact with the most and which, the least? Gorchels points to a survey wherein product managers were asked about the extent of contact they had with people inside and outside their companies, on a scale of 1 (no contact at all) to 5 (very high level of contact).
The results showed highest frequency of contact with their sales department, scoring a 4.5, followed by their research and development team, with a 4.1 score. On the lowest end of the scale were ad agencies, with 2.6 points. Somewhere in between were the production (3.9) and marketing research (3.7) areas of their company.
Gorchels starts out by discussing in Part I of her book the bedrock concepts of product management. Then she covers the upstream and downstream aspects of this discipline in Part II and Part III, respectively.
Finally she fine tunes on the subject, by calling for a global mindset among top-level executives, with most products sold in the U.S. now coming from overseas. She also calls for ensuring that product managers who are hired have the skills and experience necessary to perform according to pre-set expectations, or provide such training to existing product managers.
This is a book that has been well thought out, planned and written. Gorchels has done an exemplary job of defining the range of responsibilities and spelling out the required abilities and skills of a successful product manager. Get the book even if you’re not a product manager but have something to do with products.
