In the fast-paced E-commerce era, customers are spoilt for choice and products have a smaller shelf life than we can imagine. Nokia phones have disappeared and pagers are a thing of the past. Brands have to innovate, play to the gallery and live for customer satisfaction or else even a star product may lose its sheen overnight bringing the bottom-line and stock prices crashing down. Product Managers stand at the vanguard, leading from the front to keep companies relevant and profitable
Srikrishna Jayaram, a results driven Product Manager with 10+ years of experience pins customer centricity along with technology adoption as drivers to stay ahead of the curve. Jayaram’s penchant for product vision & roadmap creation based on astute market research skills helps him stay on top of his game.
A Globee Awards judge for Customer Excellence, Jayaram has worked with leading brand names like Walmart and Amazon creating go-to market strategy, cross-functional partnership, new marketplace expansion, dataflow and backend design. He said, “You have to remember to make life better for your customers everyday while going to work and be passionate about technology. I have based my career on this which has helped me develop multiyear product roadmaps that have enabled more than $100 Mn in cost savings”.
A regular contributor at DZone, Jayaram has also submitted a scholarly paper on The Convergence of Artificial Intelligence and Product Strategy: A Data Science Perspective on Market Disruption. Srikrishna Jayaram takes a close look at some of the key trends driving the product management industry.
Hyper-specialization
Multitasking, double hatting-triple hatting are words that go with a product manager’s role very easily. A go to for all problems and natural problem solver image needs a facelift. Jayaram who has also contributed a scholarly article on Artificial Intelligence and Product Strategy at IRJEMS commented, “PMs tend to stretch themselves too thin at times. It is important to focus on skills, areas of expertise marrying it with critical areas of product management will help professionals navigate challenges better and create their niche.
Product ops, onboarding and technical specializations will grow in demand and organizations will prefer to hire skilled managers as opposed to generalists”. Also, in recent times the profile and staffing for Product managers have widened. Instead of solo operators with marketing or technical departments whole product teams are being created by companies. Product managers are moving up the ranks to leadership roles.
Perfect Pricing.
One of the most critical aspects of product development and management is arriving at the sweet spot in terms of pricing. This aspect alone can make or break the life cycle of a product. Jayaram opined, “Subscription based services can be deployed so that users convert from trial phase to proper adoption. Developing product roadmaps while delivering incremental value is the key to find the right balance, this instils trust in customers and they feel they are getting a bang for their buck. It is important to keep customer centricity at the core of development and at the same time calculating the lifetime value of customers will eventually lead to booking concrete profits”.
Demand for data.
Jayaram advised,” Consumer behaviour must be studied in-depth before arriving at decisions. We are living in an era of data explosion; machine learning and AI have made the job easy. Once you base your decision on numbers, chances are that your product will land right. Innovations and tweaks should be made continually and for that too make data your best friend”.
Stakeholder Management post Covid
COVID-19 has brought in the remote working culture and companies till date are operating on hybrid models. Product teams are navigating this culture to be connected across board atleast with key stakeholders because the efficacy of their job depends on cross organizational inputs and a lot depends on relationships. He stated, “The setting has to be more intentional and structured as opposed to informal. Regular calls and briefings must be scheduled so that you are on the top of your game”.
Cloud Powered Roadmaps
The digital adoption in India Inc. has made static product roadmaps obsolete, companies are resorting to digital solutions like ProductPlan which are dynamic documents and key stakeholders have access at all times and even avail live updates with just a click. This makes timelines sharper, Jayaram added by saying “It puts a certain degree of pressure on product managers but it saves time and resource cost as you evade the pitfall of operating on outdated documents”.
Multiple Framework Deployment
Frameworks like Value vs. Complexity, Product Tree and MoSCow are gaining ground and product managers are using multiple frameworks to arrive at decisions around every stage of product development. “It also includes a spectrum of stakeholders and helps in setting priorities right, a right mix of frameworks and shuffling them around helps getting fresh perspective and it always helps if you think laterally”, Srikrishna Jayaram signed off.
