Product Manager's Playbook Program

Overview

Goal: Overview of how to get business results

We’ve benchmarked how the world’s great marketing companies produce superior results, year after year, and organized their secrets into the 6 activities they all perform and the five documents (in one form or another) they use to support the 6 activities.

This course will move your product managers from competency to world-class marketing excellence by showing them the Playbook used by the great marketers and giving them the job tools they need to produce significantly better results.

Product Lifecycle

Goal: Recognize and exploit the changes in your environment

The main message of the product lifecycle is change: The strategies that made you successful last year may actually hasten your downfall this year, if your product is moving to the next phase in it’s lifecycle. Each phase has its characteristic strategic marketing theme:

Introduction: Make it Real.
Growth: Get your Share.
Maturity: Differentiate or Die.
Decline: Decide.

This course gives you insights to determine where your product is in its lifecycle and tools to address the next set of challenges you’ll need to face.

Segmentation

Goal: Increase your marketing effectiveness and efficiency

Ted Leavitt, the Harvard Business School marketing guru, said, “If you’re not doing segmentation, you are not doing marketing.” Leavitt was pointing out the crucial role segmentation plays in using the principles of marketing to differentiate and gain competitive advantage, to achieve efficiencies of accurate targeting, to focus on the real competitors, and to uncover unmet needs. Too often segmentation becomes a sterile exercise that product managers delegate to market research. This course provides step-by-step processes so product managers can perform segmentation themselves and achieve strategic advantage.

Competitive Analysis

Goal: Define points-of-difference to gain competitive advantage

There is so much information available today that competitive analysis can become an end in itself. This course focuses the product manager on using competitive analysis to define points-of-difference that can be exploited for competitive advantage as well as to uncover disadvantages to work around or address head on.

Positioning

Goal: Develop positioning statement to guide marketing implementation

Great product positioning increases Return on Investment. It’s the essence of strategic marketing. This course covers the 4 elements of positioning: 1.Strategic market segmentation and target selection and profiling. 2. Competitive analysis and defining your unique point of difference (POD). 3. Making your POD credible with supporting evidence—unique product features. 4. The name of your product.

The course also illustrates the difference between mechanically going through the motions for each step and taking a fresh, creative look that gives your position the “plot twist” it needs to create competitive advantage.

Product Economics: Revenue; Cost; Capital

Goal: Understand how your product makes money, the levers you can use, and how to justify resources.

If you are going to be the general manager of your product—if you are going to really own it—you must start with an understanding of your product’s economics—how your product makes money. This course breaks down abstruse economic terms and concepts to accessible, usable illustrations and exercises that will give you the understanding you need to manage your product’s P & L.

Issues, Opportunities and Objectives

Goals: Articulate the three to five most important issues confronting your product, the Opportunities that solving the issues presents, and the strategic objectives your plans will accomplish.

World-class product plans are issue driven. Product managers are such positive people that they often skip defining problems as issues and jump right to great programs and activities to address the problems. But the short coming of jumping over the issue analysis is that when programs don’t work as they are expected to, there is no analytical foundation to parse out whether the shortfall is due to misdiagnosis of the issue, choosing the wrong strategy, or poorly executing the correct one. The I-O-O analysis is the foundation needed to set in motion a virtuous cycle of continuous learning.

Short Plan

Goals: Create a short product plan that is issue-driven, fact-based, and financially focused

Best practice is to create a short (5 to 7 pages max) plan that is fact based, issue driven, and financially justified. Long, rambling plans don’t do anyone any good. No one reads them—not even the product manager. So this course shows how to create a plan in a few pages that wins support and communicates strategy.

Implementation Plan

Goals: Create a plan specifying who will do what and when.

Product Managers know that implementation is job 1. This course shares the secrets of successful implementation used by the world’s great marketers. The hallmark of world-class product managers is that they “make their strategies happen.” And the key tool for accomplishing this is the implementation plan that specifies who will do what and when. This course provides guidance for translating strategies into implementation plans and for having dialogue with the people who will accomplish the needed tasks.

Measurement/ Monthly Summary of Business

Goals: Measure to learn and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

This course explains the critical need to “measure to learn not to punish.” It shows the ways world class product managers use measurement to learn how to improve their marketing effectiveness and improve results. It also provides a process and document template for the product manager to use to lead company thinking about their product through the monthly summary of business.

Dialogue

Goals: Use dialogue to improve your strategies and programs and get everyone on the same page.

The purpose of any planning system is to facilitate dialogue up and down the chain of command and across the functions. The Resultrek Product Manager’s Playbook features dialogue sessions on the factbase and issue definition, on the product plan, on the implementation plan, and on the status of implementation.