UC Berkeley's: Product Management

Translating Market Opportunities into Profitability

Sample Product Management Training Program Details

Day 1: Corporate and Product Strategy

Corporate and Product Strategy are vital components of the Product Management process. An intelligent, market-driven strategy should unite a company or division around the most important opportunities to pursue in order to achieve its goals. Strategic planning involves identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing all major options to determine the best direction to follow. In this session participants will:

• Discover techniques to get the most accurate, reliable competitive intelligence and learn how to use this knowledge to make informed decisions
• Acquire the skills to perform a detailed market assessment and learn how to identify technology and market trends, create market projections, properly segment the market, and determine the best markets to target
• Learn how to develop a corporate and product strategy that motivates the team and maximizes profitability

Day 1: Product Portfolio Planning

Companies must view new product investments and their associated returns in a portfolio context. This enables them to appropriately meet the firm’s strategic objectives, allocate scarce resources, drive superior operational execution, and maximize overall profitability.

In this session, we will present well-established portfolio modeling practices, as well as examine the complexities associated with developing product portfolios in rapidly changing, dynamic markets. Participants will learn to support the portfolio management process by :

• Assessing each product for strategic fit, profitability, investment requirements, risks, and other appropriate factors
• Balancing budget and available resources within the portfolio
• Using tactical models to manage the portfolio including:
  • Heuristic models
  • Scoring techniques
  • Visual or mapping techniques
  • NPV analysis

This session will also include a case study of portfolio management challenges faced by a real company.

Day 1: Product Line Design

Most firms have many products.  What is the right number of products?  How different should each product be?   What are the advantages and disadvantages of launching another product?  When should more variety be added to the product line?  How many products are too many?  How does a firm prevent cannibalization when launching new products?  Should new products be launched simultaneously or sequentially?

After this session, participants will be able to answer these questions and to design an optimal product line.  The session focuses especially on launching multiple products of varying quality within a product line.  Participants will learn through lecture, strategy discussion, and a case study.

Day 2: Pricing Strategy

Pricing right is a critical component of successful product management. Customers reject otherwise good products priced too high; companies risk losses when prices are too low. This session is designed to introduce all the components necessary to determine optimal pricing for both new and established products. Using case analysis and discussion, participants will learn how to calculate economic value to the customer and use that to understand what customers should be willing to pay. They will then learn a comprehensive framework for developing a successful pricing strategy and develop tools to analyze the role of costs, customer price sensitivity, and competition.

Day 2: Revenue Models and The Business Case

Using a case study, we will analyze potential revenue models for an innovative business to business software company. We will then provide a framework that will enable participants to determine their optimal revenue model.  We will also offer a template and thought process that will leave participants with the ability to quickly put together a business case for their company, product, or product feature.

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Day 3: Market Research

Successful and profitable product development depends on using the right tools to ask and answer the right questions. Regardless of whether research is conducted in-house or outsourced, Product Managers need to know how to use market research effectively. In this session, participants will:

• Evaluate and select appropriate methods of data gathering and research (including in-depth interviews with potential customers, focus groups, surveys, and secondary research)
• Study both qualitative and quantitative research techniques
• Discover when and how to hire an external research firm
• Learn how to perform market research and analyze data with a minimal budget

As a result of this course, participants should be able to decide when to conduct market research, what research to conduct and how to conduct it, how to analyze the data collected, and how to draw actionable conclusions from the analyses.

Day 3: Customer Focused Design

Customers buy products that fulfill specific needs. Therefore, it is vital to understand customers’ needs to ensure they are reflected in the product. And it is necessary to market products in a way that clearly shows how customer needs will be fulfilled. In this session, participants will learn to:

• Analyze and use data to make product decisions
• Write market requirements documents (MRD’s) and product requirements documents (PRD’s) that clearly and effectively communicate customer requirements to the product development team

Day 4: Leading Teams

Every Product Management professional needs team leadership skills in order to successfully work with R&D, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and other functions that comprise a product team. This session will take participants through an interactive group exercise that puts their leadership skills to the test. Groups will debrief the exercise and discuss strategies for successfully leading product teams within their own companies.

Day 4: Managing without Authority: Getting the most out of cross-functional teams

In order to meet their objectives, Product Managers must gain the commitment and cooperation of individuals outside their sphere of organizational authority. This session offers participants an opportunity to improve their influencing skills, especially in situations where they have no positional authority.

In this session participants will learn to:

• Understand the motivations of the various constituents of the product team and use this understanding to work more effectively with each member of the team
• Analyze how organizational structure and culture impacts the ability to influence others
• Identify their preferred style of influencing others and determine the effectiveness of that style
• Create negotiation and communication plans
• Focus their team on achieving results
• Resolve performance problems and keep projects on track despite the challenges that inevitably arise

Day 4: Strategic Business Interactions — Negotiation, Power and Influence

While Product Managers need analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, they also need a broad array of negotiation and communication skills in order to get these solutions accepted and implemented. The session will enable participants to manage conflict and negotiate effectively in both collaborative and competitive situations. Participants will develop these skills experientially through a negotiation simulation exercise.

In this session participants will learn:

• How to prepare for a negotiation
• Specific techniques for creating value (“expanding the pie") and dividing value (“claiming value")
• Strategies to develop trust, gather information and build relationships to enhance negotiation power
• Tactics to mitigate conflict, de-escalate conflict situations and manage people with different personalities and communication styles (“difficult people")

During the negotiation simulation exercise, specific behavior and performance feedback will be given, allowing participants the opportunity to polish their negotiation skills.

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Day 5: Creating Superior Value Propositions

Learn to market products based on superior value propositions. No matter how great the product technology, this crucial phase of product management will ultimately determine marketplace success or failure. In this session, participants will learn the principles and techniques for commercializing products. The session focuses on product life cycle management - determining the launch-readiness of a product, launch sequence and timing, and managing the product post-launch. Upon completion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Create differentiable and sustainable value propositions
• Understand the importance of product benefits (as opposed to features) in guiding marketing-mix decision making
• Identify the standard benefits that all products must possess for successful launch
• Strategically manage sales channel and customer relationships

Day 5: Competitive Advantage in Smart Markets

Smart markets are characterized by rapid changes in the knowledge or level of information associated with a company’s products, customers and competitors. In most technologically-intensive markets, traditional business strategies - developed for older, information-poor markets - are rapidly becoming obsolete. Among the most important business phenomena in recent years is the emergence of a set of new product management and commercialization techniques, using customer information as the basis for creating a sustainable advantage. In this critical, forward-looking session, participants will learn how to:

• Move beyond traditional database marketing to create truly strategic customer information assets
• Focus on new product management performance metrics such as "lifetime value of a customer" and "share of wallet"
• Adopt a "sense and respond" as opposed to "command and control" technique for managing products
• Develop and execute a new set of product management strategies such as mass customization, yield management, one-to-one marketing, extended organization and manage-by-wire