Tej Kohli Personal Blog

Most of us must have heard of Product lifecycles. Like there is product lifecycle there exist customer lifecycles too. Primarily a customer lifecycle encompass two stages, first when customer purchases the product and second when customer uses it.
However, there are a few sub-stages as well that we usually see in a more complex version of customer lifecycle. This type of lifecycle takes form when product is a service or a good that needs to be periodically replenished.

Let us now understand each stage closely:

1. Initial Customer Contact: This stage entails all the marketing, advertising and sales efforts done in order to appeal customers.

2. Customer Acquisition: One of the most crucial stages in the customer lifecycle, it is the phase where the customer is build. It involves an agreement between the customer and the organization to exchange money for the product.

3. Product use: It depends entirely on the nature of product. If the product has one-time use, it indicates that the customer needs to purchase the product again for next use. While, there are also products that can be used over and over again. Thus payment for the product can be made once or on recurrent basis.

4. Periodic contact: Once the product is under use, the customer may need to contact the company for a variety of reasons. Some of the most typical interaction forms are- Customer Service, Billing, Technical support and Sales call. It is the most crucial stage where the whole process makes or breaks. It is always sensible to employ some high-tech CRM applications that reduce the manual work and streamlines the whole operation. It is cost effective and saves time too.

5. Product upgrade: There is a constant need to upgrade the product so as to retain a customer. As a basic tendency the customers swap over products frequently. Thus, it’s imperative for a company to maintain a well managed product portfolio that can address the ever changing needs of the customer.

6. Deprovisioning: Certainly the most overlooked aspect of customer lifecycle. Once the customer has discontinued the use of a particular product, there is still a lot more that needs to be taken care of. Especially, where service with a recurring billing has been provided, if the customer is not properly deprovisioned, there will be future costs resulting from either providing service that is not being paid for or from billing a customer who is not receiving service. In either case there are likely to be costly customer support calls and an unhappy customer. Customer deprovisioning, where appropriate, should be planned for and built into the product from the beginning.

Sequentially moving through all these stages, customer lifecycle comes to a complete circle.

Tej Kohli gives a list of his favourite Product Management books:

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

The Product Manager’s Handbook : The Complete Product Management Resource by Linda Gorchels

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Profitable Decision Making (3rd Edition) by Thomas T. Nagle

Winning at New Products: Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch, Third Edition by Robert G. Cooper

Harvard Business Review on Brand Management (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series) by Erich Joachimsthaler

How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon

Sales & Operations Planning — The How-To Handbook by Thomas Wallce

Software Product Management Essentials by Alyssa S. Dver

Retail Product Management by R. Varley

Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy

Product Development for the Service Sector: Lessons from Market Leaders by Robert G. Cooper

Harvard Business Review on Marketing by Harvard Business School Press

Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin 

To begin this article, Let’s first discuss what really is Product Management..I came across the following definitions on the web:

• Assigning specific products or brands to be managed by single managers within an advertising or PR agency
• Product management is an organizational function within a company dealing with the product planning or product marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle

If you want to be a bad product manager, confuse product management with project management. The words are so close because the two concepts are so similar. Product managers should manage projects since they need to ensure that the projects get done. They’re both management roles (right?) so the skills and experience are virtually the same. Project managers just get in the way and try to take control of the project away from the product manager.

If you want to be a good product manager, learn the difference between product management and project management. Despite the similar names, there are big differences between product management and project management. Confusing them is common, even among those experienced in product development.

Project managers are responsible for the successful delivery of a project — a one-time endeavor with a goal, scope, deadline, budget, and other constraints. A project manager will work to align resources, manage issues and risks, and basically coordinate all of the various elements necessary to complete the project. As they relate to products, projects can be undertaken to build a product, to add new features to a product, or create new versions or extensions of a product. When the project is complete, the project manager will usually move move to a new project, which may be related to a different product.

Product managers are responsible for the overall and ongoing success of a product. Once the project to build the product is complete and the project manager has moved on, the product manager remains to manage the product through the entire lifecycle. Other projects related to the product may be initiated, with the product manager being the one constant stream throughout, defining the project goals and guiding the team to accomplish the business objectives that have been defined.

One challenge of the two roles is that they can appear to be at odds with each other. A product manager may want to add a lot of features to meet observed customer needs, but the project manager may want to keep scope as small as possible so that the project is delivered on time and under budget. Traditional definitions (and probably those above, too) often mischaracterize the project manager as singularly focused on getting the project finished on time and under budget without any concern as to whether it meets the market or customer needs.

Good product managers and good project managers are able to create a balance of these conflicts. Good project managers know that the true success of a project is not whether it is on time and within budget, but whether it meets the defined goals and objectives. Good product managers know that all the features in the world will not matter if the project is continually delayed and never makes it to market or if it is too over budget to be completed.

Especially for web-based and technology products, the confusion between project and product management is common and potentially harmful to organizations who do not acknowledge the distinction.