Product Management Approaches - New Product vs. Existing Product

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I wanted to compare and contrast the product management approach for a new product vs. an existing product. As a Product Manager, you need to be conscious of which phase your product is at in the product life cycle.

If you are taking up a new job, then it is critical that you keep track of the stages of your product as not all product management approaches will fit to all types of products. Also, different Product Managers are good at different product management approaches.

For a new product the following steps generally take this logical order:

Opportunity Discovery ==> Opportunity Assessment ==> Opportunity Validation ==> Product Discovery ==> Product Validation ==> Finalize Metrics (KPI) ==> Execution ==> Go-to-market strategy ==> Launch ==> Post-Launch Assessment

Opportunity discovery occurs mainly through ideation, where you explore various ideas, but often the founder in a startup or other senior executives in a large company tell you what you need to explore. You are mainly trying to find a customer’s needs, which are either stated and unmet or unstated needs, which your company can solve by bringing a new product to market.

In the Opportunity Assessment phase, you evaluate the product idea to decide whether it has any legs. You want to achieve something quick, instead of writing a long MRD document. For more coverage on the topic you can read renowned Silicon Valley Product Management thought leader Marty Cagan’s blog here. The goal of the opportunity assessment is to evaluate if the company should pursue the idea and if the answer is yes, then assess what it will take to succeed.

During the Opportunity Validation step you are validating your hypothesis with the target customer. If the target customer is not excited about the opportunity, then the necessity of the product is not genuine enough that the customer will eventually pay for a solution.

In the Product Discovery phase you are quickly iterating through various solutions to meet the customer’s need. In this phase you develop a rapid prototype, which you can present to customers for confirmation. In the Product Validation phase, you present the prototype and gain valuable feedback for further refinement.

If the target customer does not resonate with the product, then either one of the following is true:
· You are talking to the wrong user
· Your solution/product does not meet the user’s need
· The necessity is not valuable enough for the user

The first two reasons are fixable, but if you have stumbled upon a need, which is not critical enough for the customer to either use/pursue a solution or pay for it, then you are better off abandoning the idea.
After the product validation phase, you need to define product by using business metrics, with which you can measure the success of the product in the market. Defining success metrics is a separate blog topic in and of itself so I will skip past it for now.

Finally, you need to develop the product. You must create the go-to-market strategy and launch the product. After launching the product you need to measure the product performance against the metrics you have created earlier. It is important to continuously compare against those metrics and iterate on the product features until you are moving the needle on your metrics.

Each of these phases are important individually and are based on where the product is in its life-cycle (development, introduction, growth, maturity, decline), you might be involved in one or more of these activities.

Compare this to the product management approach you will adopt for existing products where you analyze the usage, develop metrics, and build features to meet business goals. Most of these metrics (business or product) will revolve around acquisition, conversion, and retention. Engagement features are part of the retention metrics.

For an existing product the following steps make logical sense:

Usage Analysis ==> Create Metrics (KPI) ==> Execution ==> Launch ==> Post-Launch Assessment

While taking up a new job, it is critical for you to know which product you are going to lead (new vs. existing) and what stage of its life cycle it is at. These two dimensions will help you choose the best product management approach for the given situation. In this blog we covered the differences in Product Management approaches between new and existing product. I will address the differences in product management approach for a product at various stages of product life-cycle in future blogs.