It 'pretty hard to imagine a product manager for a "real" product, how difficult this task is, if your company go, and decided to begin offering service products. One might think that a flexible product manager could only adjust quickly and there is no real difference between the administration "hard" products and "service" of products. Umm, it would be wrong.
If your company makes a big decision to move and begin to offer service products as a product of your lifeManager will change big time. There are four key success factors that need to be sure to take care of itself, to ensure that you are a successful product manager for services:
Make the company understand that there is already a service: If your company has decided to launch service products, you may find that you are doing already. Instead, invent new products, maybe all you need to do is start charging for things thatAre already doing. As product manager, the first step to be here and working with your clients in order to ensure that adding value to your existing services are well known. You must be careful here: if you suddenly pass a free service is now available, you must make sure that you clearly define the value of the service, both customers and internal management. The bigger your company, the better the chances are you already have hidden benefitssomewhere, not as it is currently active. One of the best ways to discover what we already have a look at the customer invoices - often different parts of the company accounts for various things and some may even billing for services.
Turn your support of Back Office Services to know: Product Manager, how important robust internal processes to your ability to consistently offer products. Bad news: if you start at the service of products offeredYou will find that meet the needs of customer service for their needs will meet a dramatically negative effect on the cost of delivery of the goods, too. To resolve this problem, there are three things you can do: (1) build a flexible platform to deliver services and meet customer needs, (2) monitor the costs for each of your delivery processes in order to identify high-cost (3) the use of new technologies to improve processes, when implementingpossible. All this means that the crib products and initiatives, as products are delivered to the service permit.
Update your sales team: This might be the most important thing - finding a way for the sales force, which is convenient to the sale of "real change" in a single product, the service can sell products. One of the most difficult to convey is the simple fact that the service to take a lot of products to sell and the actual sales processis much more complex and strategic. As a product manager is not your responsibility, which is controlled by the sales teams change, but how well they manage the transformation of how successful your product is. Understand that in most cases, a significant number of current sales team will be left at the end of the company and new employees who have a better understanding of how to replace your services.
To focus on what customers do their job: For a serviceProduct is really designed to be used by a customer to easily manage their business, a good product manager's time to shift attention away from the way he / she is the provision of services and to start thinking about how the customer goes to use the service. This is an important difference in how "hard" work product companies - tend to focus on things like what the device is used and how many use a particular product, a customer. A product of service is really designedto solve a problem for your customers. This means that the right way its value is measured to see if it really solve the problem. Be careful, as a manager of product, you may find that you have a lack of know-how to determine how you use the product to solve customer problems better. This may be a good time to bring a consultant.
