Product managers find themselves in just about every part of a product’s life cycle.
They are known to study and analyze market research data to draw up strategies for the product. They also determine its specifications and requirements and use their financial and technological resources to bring the product to market effectively.
Their job is to make the product vision and marketing strategy abundantly clear to the shareholders and investors of the company, to get their approval for the production and development expenditure. A product manager also bears the responsibility of ensuring the employees understand their respective roles and coordinate with other departments.
Seeing how you need a product manager to initiate and orchestrate the development and launch of the product, you ought to find someone who has ample product management training to further your product.
Skills that Product Managers Ought to Have
Prioritization
Product managers ought to consider and analyze the impact of potential failures and threats and devise contingency production strategies and countermeasures accordingly.
Knowing how to Price the Product
Product managers need to be familiar with the fundamental business policies and analyze market data to decide on the right price for the product. The operational and development costs, promotional costs, packaging, and distribution costs are considered.
Excellent Communication Skills
Product managers need to have excellent communication skills as they interact with customers, various departments and teams, shareholders, and so forth. Product managers are responsible for clearly conveying the vision and description of the product.
Strategizing
A product manager needs to be able to be aware of the time constraints, and estimate the time required accordingly at each stage of the production cycle. In addition to this, a product manager must be able to manage risks and formulate strategies to gain the upper hand in the market.
Analytical Thinking
You need your product manager to analyze and research data, and not just go by intuition to make the right decisions for the product to succeed. Some necessary analytical skills are entrepreneurship, tracking progress, beta testing, deductive and inductive reasoning, SWOT analysis, and risk management.
People Skills
Given how product managers interact with dozens of people from sales, marketing, finance, customers, and so forth, they need to be able to communicate their objectives, goals, and vision as clearly as possible.
People skills include problem sensitivity, emotional intelligence, being influential, leadership, oral and written communication, ability to address objections and problems, public speaking, being willing to take feedback, presentation skills, collaboration, ability to hold meetings, ability to operate under pressure, teamwork, and negotiation.
Marketing Skills
Marketing plays an immeasurable role in a product’s success. Product managers ought to promote and deliver products to customers. They are in charge of monitoring the advertising and sales teams, the promotional offers, campaigns, image of the brand, discounts, and a whole lot more.
Product managers also have to be involved in customer service, respond to continually changing demands, research the latest market trends, develop pricing framework, and value propositions.
Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) is at its base, an on-demand software which allows a client to host their application on the cloud for customers and potential customers to access using a web browser. This SaaS model works seamlessly for small and medium scale businesses because they can avoid investing additional servers, software licenses, or hardware upgrades.
Companies can upgrade or downgrade their consumption based on their requirements, and these can be adjusted in their monthly SaaS subscription fee.
SaaS Companies Worth Checking Out
Upkeep
UpKeep is known as the leading mobile-first Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). You can expect this CMMS to show you the right plan based on the features you want. Upkeep has a variety of features to its credit.
It allows you to seamlessly manage your work orders for emergency repairs and preventive maintenance. Finding a work order, creating unlimited recurring work orders, tracking time and expenses, and drawing up automated workflows should be no problem.
You have the option of giving anybody the ability to send work requests to improve corrective maintenance workflows and response times.
Google Apps
Google Apps has a significant number of SaaS applications under its belt, including professional business email, shared calendars, video conferencing, and a whole lot more.
Google Drive cloud storage is one of the leading SaaS examples. It allows authorized employees and staff to access the files they choose from any device that is connected to the internet, and share them instantly.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon seems to have done an excellent job expanding its horizons. It now supports cloud-based IT applications known as Amazon Web Services. They have over 70 SaaS applications on offer, some of which are networking, storage, deployment, analytics, computing and database management, Internet of Things (IoT), etc.
Zendesk
Zendesk makes it simple and straightforward for its users to tackle inbound requests across multiple communication channels such as social media, phone, or video chat. Their primary features include a machine learning AI tool to solve customer queries, a real-time chat service, and built-in call support.
Slack
Slack is a highly popular SaaS application that offers real-time messaging and chat features. Users can dedicate different channels to specific projects and decide who can interact, whether private, invite-only participants or heads of projects. Users can also share documents, spreadsheets, PDF files.
If used effectively, SaaS applications can significantly reduce infrastructure costs and vastly speed up implementation.
