The Accidental Product Manager

Just in case you didn’t know it, ordering food to be delivered to your  home has exploded in the past few years.  More and more customers are  going online and placing orders for food that they expect to show up at  their home quickly. For the product managers who are working at the  restaurants that are providing all of this food, times have been tough.  As the number of orders has been increasing, the restaurant’s ability to  create and ship that much food has been strained. What the product managers need is more kitchen space.  They are starting to think that they may have found a new place to build more of what they need.

In order to be a successful product manager, often we will have to use our product development definition to find partners for our company to work with.   Once we’ve entered into an agreement with them, in order for our  product to be a success, both partners have to do their part. This is  all fine and good until the day that you discover that your partner has gone bankrupt. If that happens, what does it mean for your partnership?  What does it mean for your partner?

When you want to get a cup of coffee, where do you go? In the U.S., most  of us generally head to a Starbucks.  It turns out that if we were in  China, this is also something that we can do – Starbucks has expanded  until they are just about everywhere in China. However, as Starbucks has  become more and more successful, other firms have seen this and have  decided that they want to start to offer coffee in China. The Starbucks  product managers are now starting to face more competition for business in China than they have ever experienced before.  What should they do with their product development definition now?

If you were the product manager for a new social media app, what would  your #1 goal be every day when you went to work?  There is only one  answer to that question: to sign up more users for you app. Social media is all about growth. There are a number of new social media apps that are being created by  Chinese companies (who else would know about what appeals to millions of  people?) and they think that they may have found an untapped market.   The product managers for these Chinese companies are going after users in India where there are millions of people just waiting to discover the next big social media app.

You would think that if you were a product manager at one of the world’s  largest retail companies, getting into a new line of business would not  be all that hard to do.  I mean your company has deep pockets and can  probably spend a lot of money to do whatever everyone else in this new  market is doing. The result isn’t if you are going to be successful,  it’s really more a question of just how successful you are going to be.   As Walmart has gotten into the home grocery delivery business, their  product managers have discovered that even being big may not be enough to ensure that they will be a success.

You would think that being a burger product manager would be a fairly  simple job: you get the burger, you make the burger, you sell the  burger.  However, once upon a time it might have been that simple;  however, these days it has become much more complicated. If you can  ignore for a moment the fact that you are facing a great deal of  competition, it now turns out that your customer’s tastes are changing.   Burger product managers have a challenge on their hands and they are  going to have to get creative and change their product development  definition.

Advertising product managers are always looking for the next “big  thing”.  The advertising market has its ups and downs as customer’s  needs, wants, and moods change seemingly overnight. These product  managers have the responsibility to keep their eyes open all the time  searching for the new ways that they can expand their product  development definition and help the firms that manufacture goods get their message in front of their next customer.   Right now what these product managers are doing is turning their attention to what they hope will be the next new engine of growth for  the industry: direct-to-consumer marketers.

The product managers at Facebook are facing a serious challenge.  They  have to find ways to expand their product development definition and  make Facebook more interesting and relevant to their visitors. One great  way to make this happen is to provide Facebook visitors with access to current news.  This is easy to do on the national and international scale – there are a  lot of sources of that news.  However, what the product managers are  discovering is that getting local news can be a really tough job.

Just imagine if you were a cigarette product manager.  You are  responsible for a product that is both addictive and reviled. You’ve  been doing quite well for yourself for a very long time; however, now things are starting to change.  Young people seem to getting the message and are less likely to start  to use your products. At the same time, a new type of smoking product, vaping, has shown up and seems to be doing very well.  What is a product  manager to do?

Anyone who has a baby can tell you that they spend a lot of time giving  their baby baths.  When they do this, they require special products –  things like baby shampoo. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that the  market for baby products is huge. One of the biggest players in this  market is a company that we have all probably heard of: Johnson & Johnson (J&J). They have been around for a very long time and providing baby products is something that they are well known for. However, lately their market share in this critical market has been decreasing.  What’s going wrong and what can J&J’s product managers do about it?