PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

SparQ Strategy can help build your product management organization from scratch or optimize your mature organization. We can assess your organization and build up the tools and processes and provide training to help your organization bring innovative and differentiated products to markets as part of our product management consulting services.

Processes and Tools

For a business to be agile and deliver differentiated products and services it has to be “market led”. “Market led” starts with having a robust set of tools and processes which enable businesses to understand customer pain points and preferences, distill market feedback into vibrant product roadmaps delivering differentiated products, develop products at quicker than market cycle times and commercialize products realizing true potential of the business case and take share

Organizational Benchmarking

Growth in a consistent manner requires businesses to have the right tools and processes in place and product managers with the right training and skill sets. As part of our product consulting services, SparQ helps businesses to benchmark their product development and management processes and product manager capabilities and skill sets and develop a plan to either put in place from scratch or improve processes and people capabilities delivering:

Benchmarking and understanding of product management fundamentals by product manager
Process and Tools Gap analysis
Product Management Fundamentals Training
Product manager coaching

The first element of being a “market led” organization is understanding what the customer pain points or unmet needs are and how do they make their buying decisions and being able to take the data to distil into new product concepts and segment customers based on buying preferences. Many customers may not be able to articulate what product they need. Successful VOC depends on being able to understand customer workflows and discovering unmet needs. As part of our product management consulting services, SparQ helps businesses set up tools and processes to conduct VOC and coaches product managers on how to recognize customer unmet needs.

Voice of the Customer (VOC)

Businesses often develop what they perceive game changing products but inexplicably the launch never takes off. They often take the shotgun approach to target the customer base often targeting the wrong set of customers. Market segmentation is a precise approach to understanding the customer base and choosing segments which match up with the business’s product strategy. It is a rifle shot approach to targeting customers. Market segmentation process development and coaching is an important element of our product management consulting services. SparQ helps businesses and marketers develop market segmentation models, criteria for selecting target segments and develop personas for target segments to enable business take a precise approach to targeting customers with new products and then also use the personas to develop marketing assets for downstream customer acquisition.

Market Segmentation

Product Development Process

To be able to take product ideas from concept all the way to launch and generate successful outcomes consistently it is important to have a product development process which suits the businesses' needs. Stage Gate or Agile? Each has its own place. Stage Gate is a sequential process and has been a process which has traditionally been followed. Stage Gate which is a sequential often gets a bad rap as being slow. Agile has its origins in software development but is gaining steam at many organizations for bringing market to product at reduced cycle times and incorporating customer needs quickly. Each type of process has it place. As part of our product management consulting services, SparQ helps businesses choose a process which fits their needs best, helps to customize the process and develop the underlying processes and tools and helps coach teams on executing the process successfully.

Product mangers are considered mini General Managers of their product portfolio. This means not only are they responsible for revenue growth but also for inventory and profitability. As part of being responsible for inventory and profitability product managers will need to rationalize skus and even certain product families or businesses which are dilutive in terms of margins/EBITDA and will also need to make general manager type of decisions regarding skus and product families which create significant excess and obsolescence. Portfolio management process development and coaching is an important element of our overall product management consulting services. SparQ helps businesses manage their portfolios to increase profit through developing and customizing processes and tools for product portfolio management and coaching product managers.

Portfolio Management

Pricing

Pricing represents the single most powerful and effective tool to increase EBITDA. McKinsey estimates a 1% increase in pricing leads to an 8% increase in EBITDA. Pricing will need to be managed at three levels: Industry level, product/market level and transaction level. As part of our product management consulting services, SparQ helps business increase their price realization through analyzing and optimizing the price waterfall, coaching product managers to transition to Value Pricing through developing price Value curves and positioning products appropriately on the price value curve. Ability to realize value pricing represents a major indicator of product differentiation. SparQ also helps business to develop and implement pricing rhythms, processes and helps business to develop and implement pricing rhythms, processes and tools.

Product Commercialization

Many organizations spend considerable amount of time and resources developing new products only to see product launches taking a lot of time to execute and ramp up. Many times customers are promised new products which do not arrive on time causing lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Often launch campaigns are executed without the proper set of marketing assets. Many organizations have not switched to digital whereas the customer base has, resulting in low launch awareness. SparQ helps organizations with developing and streamlining product commercialization processes, as part of our product management consulting services.