Why there aren’t many Product Management software in the market?
The road not taken; yet.
As a practicing Product Manager, and having worked on different capacities for various Product Strategy teams, I always wondered why I am stuck to the same boring MS Office (Excel and Powerpoint) tools to perform my tasks and support decisions. The world is seeing an exponential growth in terms of number of software products coming into market everyday, for different kinds of web and mobile users. Every such product would require some product management capacity to validate the product-market fit and nurture the feature priorities. But, why none of those start-up entrepreneurs have really thought about developing an application for such utility?
The very moment I had this question in I went ahead publishing it on Quora, to crowd-source feedback from experts.
The question invites different perspectives that narrow down to the fact that Product Management (PM) is a niche market with Product Managers wearing multiple hats, including that of a Marketer, Designer, Business Analyst, Business Leader, Sales Expert, Pricing Strategist etc. PM function in organizations has always struggled to demarcate its boundary as it overlaps with other core business functions. So we end up using tools made for specialized functions and forget that our unique utilities deserve a tool by itself.
That should not be the case anymore.
What is Product Management and ‘The Process’ involved?
From my experience, PM is all about business keeping. The function begins where creativity sparks. We take the spark, draw a feature, validate if someone is ready pay for it, verify if it makes sense for the target customer, persuade the stakeholders, prioritize ideas, inspire the developers, take the finished feature to marketing and sales and help them sell it. We work in parallel to repeat this cycle to carry the product vision forward, faster.
In abstract, the PM function involves list making, gathering feedback, pivoting thought process and executing ideas to materialize product vision.
We continue to use excel to make lists, categorize and prioritize ideas and collaborate; we use powerpoint documents to communicate the idea for validation.
Updated June 16, 2016: Almost three years since writing this blog I could now see a handful of Product Management tools and I have put together a blog about some of them.
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