Managing Products & Services

Product Management, according to PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association, is defined as:
Ensuring over time that a product or service profitably meets the needs of customers by continually monitoring and modifying the elements of the marketing mix, including: the product and its features, the communications strategy, distribution channels and price.

Source: The PDMA Glossary for New Product Development

Product Management becomes Business Development when new markets can be tackled with existing products or services. It is here, that true revolutionary growth of a business is possible and achievable: An entire marketing dimension can be added without impacting the production engine of a business — these activities focus on sales and marketing, spearheaded by the Product Manager.


Variation of Fast-Track based on Stage-Gate™ by Robert G. Cooper
Variation of Fast-Track based on the
Stage-Gate™ model by Robert G. Cooper

The Stage-Gate™ Approach to New Product Development, as described by Robert G. Cooper in his excellent book " Winning at New Products" (Perseus Publishing, Third Edition) is a straight-forward method to manage the product life cycle, from idea inception to market retirement. Stage-Gate™ can be adapted to any company size — the document overhead for the process can be minimal, yet it allows to make committed decisions and define realistic targets for products and product lines.