What is a Product Management Review?
The Product Management Review is a deep-dive review of your company’s product management. It gives leaders a comprehensive set of actionable recommendations and a roadmap, for improving their product management function.
Our customers often describe the review in their own words:
‘A comprehensive review’
‘A 360º diagnostic’
‘An audit’
‘A deep-dive’
‘An assessment’
‘A roadmap and action plan to world-class product management”
In truth, our clients use the words that are most positive and helpful to them in their own business context.
Why would I need a Product Management Review?
The Product Management Review is a professional consultancy service, needed by leaders in specific high-stakes situations:
- You inherit a large, complex, or dysfunctional product management organization – you now want to reorganize or make major improvements to performance and outcomes.
- You need to re-build or optimize a product management function and major processes – but you don’t have the time, people, or deep product management skills to guide you.
- Product Management is happening unofficially or haphazardly in your company – you need to demonstrate the value of product management to senior leaders or your Board and establish a dedicated world-class product management function.
- You’ve made (or need to make) complex product organization and process changes or improvements – because of acquisitions, mergers, demergers, or leadership changes.
- Your company business model is transforming – due to this, new divisions, departments, product functions, product lines, and processes must be created.
Perhaps you are facing a similar challenge? If you already know that you want some help, then please contact us.
What value do I get with a Product Management Review?
Our customers are often stuck because of sheer complexity or lack of know-how, time, or people… but they urgently need to get a diagnosis and action plan, to improve their product management.
This is the value we bring to you:
- Independent external review of your product management, by industry experts.
- Structure, focus, and momentum: a proven framework, a methodology, a plan, and people to help you make things happen – to get things moving.
- Stakeholder alignment on the purpose and value of product management – how it delivers value throughout your business.
- Industry best practice and deep experience – the objective perspective to provide a realistic, actionable plan.
- 360º review of product management as experienced across your business teams – including product management, development, operations, marketing, finance and others.
- Structured consideration of key areas, including organization, governance, accountability, communications, product taxonomy, prioritization, new product introduction process, and tooling.
- Comprehensive and actionable recommendations, with a suggested business-roadmap of activities to improve your product management function – this gives you confidence and an action plan.
How long will the Product Management Review take?
The time to complete a review is usually several weeks and is dependent upon these factors:
- The size and complexity of your product management function and organization.
- Calendar availability of sponsors and key stakeholders within your business – for discussions and interviews.
- The time required to interview teams and to analyze product management materials, processes, and interview notes.
- Complexity of formulation of recommendations and action plans.
A review could take between 2 and 8 weeks, depending upon your needs.
What is the output of a Product Management Review?
The output is a comprehensive volume of findings and actionable recommendations, plus a business roadmap to deliver against – everything that you need to hit the ground running… to make change happen, to improve your product management.
What should I expect during the Product Management Review?
- We provide structure, focus, and momentum with a proven framework, a methodology, a plan, and people to help you make things happen – so, we help you get things moving.
- Vastly experienced Lead, and Senior Consultants will review any of your processes and materials – they’ll also interview your teams to uncover problems and opportunities. Since they’re experienced, they’ll deliver a high-quality analysis and set of practical recommendations.
- A dedicated Client Director will be your single point of commercial contact – so, ensuring success.
- A professional consultancy engagement with Product Focus, spanning several weeks in time – with a combination of remote and on-site meetings.
What happens after the Product Management Review – can you help further?
After the review, we can discuss various ways to help you – with product management team training, product leader training, or activation workshops.
Why use Product Focus for a Product Management Review?
The Product Management Review uses a proven process, to investigate product management at your company. During the review, we conduct extensive research on your business to analyze and compare your product management against best practice. After the review, we will design a program of continuous improvement with you – a practical roadmap for improving your product management.
We carry out our research on-site or remotely, using video and collaboration tools. Thus, we can cover multiple geographies or locations very effectively.
So why Product Focus?
- Independent industry-leading expertise: You’ll benefit from our industry expertise and independent viewpoint, developed over 16 years. Because of this, we know what works and what doesn’t work, after helping thousands of companies, across dozens of industries.
- Proprietary tools and insights: We have an extensive library of insights and tools, like the Product Management Maturity Model and Product Activities Framework. Thus, we can rapidly pinpoint common issues and pain points – and suggest best practice improvements.
- A practical and impartial partner : We give you practical recommendations that will have a big impact on your business. Since we take a practical approach, our customers implement over 65% of our recommendations within 12 months.
We also provide other services to help product management leaders.
A few examples of our work
US Financial services company
- Taxonomy definition: workshop to define taxonomy levels and the naming to use across the business
- Roadmaps: facilitated workshops with each team, agreeing a common roadmap structure and ensuring draft roadmaps defined for all products
- Prioritization approach: Common structure defined to drive consistent prioritization approach aligned within the business
African Solar Energy Business
- New Product Development (NPD) Process: updated and all templates improved
- Proposition: customer needs analysis and personas now routinely used
- Roadmaps: used by hardware team and visible to those that need to see across the business
- Strategy communication: 3 year strategy defined and communicated from management team to improve bottom-up alignment
- Management team governance: redefined to improve decision-making at working level vs. management level
