The New Normal in Marketing
by Khachik Badeyan
Management
Gone are the days when a boss would sit in an armchair in his cozy room isolated from his employees who are just a cog in the mechanism generating money for the former. What matters nowadays is the team and the management.
A good manager is the one who can outsource as much routine and repetitive tasks to his employees and respective departments as possible. However in the case of CEO or any high rank manager even that is not enough as there is a need to monitor all the job done and the product progress. If we look even further – when a new project starts the high rank managers won’t have enough time to monitor all change and keep up with the daily tasks.
Who are Product Managers?
Product managers are people who grow products, whose each decision is based on numbers, on analytics and logical reasoning. The product is their sun and they revolve around it. Their sole goal is the product growth.
Every product manager has KPIs and all of them unite in one term named growth.
What is Product?
As stated by Simon Sinek in his why/how/what presentation at TED it does not matter what you offer to people, if you don’t know why they should want have it, and how you shall make the product exist and deliver them to customers. A product is the feeling, an urgent need to have the thing a company can offer.
Companies shall never proceed to thinking about how to deliver a commodity to the customer before
- creating an itch or finding a pain that troubles many
- putting the product there to comfort those
- creating an emotional bond
Product Growth.
No matter what is the product and what are the KPIs of a product thes 3 steps are crucial to every growth strategy
- Getting Visitors
make people see your product
- Activating Members
make people take action
- Activating Users
make people believe in your product
The most important for doing the above of course is having the right data and the right tools to analyse it. Implementing the analyitics is one of the most important tasks of a product manager.
A thing to remember – product manager without numbers is a disaster.
The Team
The 2 cornerstones of hiring:
- CEOs hire Product Managers who know more than them.
- Product Managers hire those who know what they don’t and do what they don’t (want to) do.
The big problem with old style business was that only people with lower than the employer qualifications would be hired (mostly). But the progress shows that managers shall hire people from whom learning something is possible.
Automation
The next big piece in this game is the time management. The product manager shall automate whatever actions is possible (paying bills, sending response emails to customers, shipping) and outsource as much action to his employees as possible.
Often employees need to decide whether to accept the money transaction or the refund dispute or reject it? In the old style business all employees need permission from superior officers. The new business on the other hand won’t work like that: employees shall inherit a part of the decision making permissions from higher ranked personnel. The last also creates ground for the employees to grow both as professionals and business owners (by the means of being part of the decision making process).
Product manager suggests but does not force. All in all the best Product Manager is the one who leaves the company and nothing breaks.
ProductCamp Yerevan 