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Lavina Gully, Regional Innovation Director for BC and Yukon, sits down with Jeff Epstein of North Vancouver, BC’s 16 Volts and Grants for Growth, to discuss the role of a product manager, the importance of product management, and the significant advantages it offers food and beverage companies. Following the video is a Q&A between Lavina and Jeff with details from their discussion, as well as more information on product management.
Q: What is product management?
A: Product management oversees a product’s lifecycle, from development to commercialization. A product manager has a responsibility to ensure the product meets customers’ needs, while generating revenue for the company. For that reason the product manager is part engineer, part designer, part marketer, and exists at the intersection of all those company functions.
Q: What are the key responsibilities and functions of a product manager?
A: Their responsibilities revolve around ensuring that what the company is producing is strongly aligned with the target audience, and that there’s profit involved. They are responsible for helping sales projections and creating the persona of the people who will be using those products. Other responsibilities include creating a roadmap with a 12- to 24-month view of what R&D will be working on, and creating a Product Requirements Document (PRD) – also known as a Product Brief – to outline the specific requirements of the product in question. For food, that would include target audience information, use cases, core ingredients/exclusions (e.g. allergens), packaging and anything else needed by R&D and production to bring the product to life. The product manager sets and manages pricing in order to achieve desired revenue and margin objectives; orchestrates all the moving pieces to get the product to market; and keeps their finger on the pulse of the customer to track and understand how their preferences and use cases evolve.
Q: What does a day in the life of a product manager look like?
A: It may begin with meeting with the engineers and/or R&D developers to determine the progress of products under development, any roadblocks, where this fits into the product roadmap and what to prioritize. Then they’d meet with the marketing people to relay any market research, messaging and storytelling, and product launches coming up. That would be followed by a sales meeting to gain feedback about product users and competitors in the market. After that they may meet with finance to discuss packaging costs, profit margins, price points and other conversations around financing. At the end of the day they will meet with company executives to talk profit and loss, challenges and possible improvements. The product manager is really enmeshed in all areas of the company.
Q: The role of product manager doesn’t seem to be as common in the food industry as it is in industries like software or biotech. Why do you think this is?
A: Much of it comes down to semantics. The role of product manager has its roots in the consumer-packaged goods sector, as brand manager, which had become a critical role by the 1990s. Brand managers are very similar to product managers. In fact the titles can be interchangeable in some companies, so the role of product manager may already exist in the brand manager. But a quick look on LinkedIn reveals a lot of product manager jobs at food companies.
Q: So how is a product manager different from brand managers, R&D managers and project managers?
A: There is overlap. All these roles look at products from more than just a technical perspective – they all look beyond that to market adoption and even financial performance. Brand managers have a big emphasis on sales and marketing, while R&D managers are more focused on the technical side of the business and don’t usually get involved with product launches or customer-facing situations. Project managers are a different breed too – their expertise is really in efficient and methodical execution of a project. A good product manager has to be good at project management as well. If you ask me, a company with food scientists and brand managers are missing that key middle piece: someone who understands the market and knows how to translate that into technical terms to inspire and guide product development.
Q: What is product lifecycle and how does the product manager approach it?
A: A product has five lifecycle stages: ideation, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. The product manager is the person keeping their eye on that entire cycle, and understands where products are so the company can optimize resources around production, distribution, marketing and sales. The Product Brief will cover information required during the ideation and introduction phases. But the product manager’s job doesn’t end there. Once a product is launched the product manager will keep in contact with sales and marketing to review how well the product is doing, and if it’s hitting revenue numbers. They will also spend time in retail stores to monitor customer sales and feedback. As demand grows they may present new revenue stream opportunities, while keeping tabs on the competition, changing consumer tastes, and general signs of disruption for the business. The product manager is also responsible for determining when a product is no longer viable, and coming up with ideas to replace it.
Q: Why should a company introduce the role of product manager?
A: It comes down to bandwidth – in small companies you have many people doing parts of this role, but they also have other responsibilities. You may consider adding a product manager when things start falling off the table – you lose sight of the competitors, you aren’t doing as much consumer research, or you haven’t taken a good look at pricing in a while. You may already have individuals in your company who are ready to take on this role. Having someone watch every element of the lifecycle of a product and making sure the company is paying attention to those milestones is a big advantage for a company. It is also a mindset – a cultural shift towards bringing more discipline or structure into your business. You’ll find better skill development across your team as well, because everybody’s focus narrows.
Q: How does a product manager foster innovation within a company?
A: They do this a few ways. Through keeping regular tabs on product users and their use cases during primary and secondary research; through competitive intelligence, keeping regular tabs on the competition, direct and substitute, and where they’re taking their products in terms of ingredients, packaging, positioning, distribution and more; through regular conversations with the sales team, which is the closest proxy to the consumer, so they’ll have valuable input on trends, preferences, and competitors; and through systemized roadmap reviews - the further out you look on a roadmap, the more things can change. The product manager has to help the company stay focused while also being open to redirection as dictated by the market. Roadmaps should be reviewed quarterly with sales, partners, R&D, and leadership. Finally, product managers foster innovation through general market intelligence - they should be on the lookout for new consumer trends and tastes, and retail changes in the market including newcomers, new distribution and packaging opportunities.
Q: What are some of the key differences in developing software versus a new food, and what should product managers in the food industry be mindful of?
A: I think the biggest difference is that food is not as easily iterative as software; it’s a lot more costly to experiment with ingredients and chemistry than it is to write a line of code, which has no downstream impact if it gets thrown out. It’s also a lot harder, more complicated, and slower to get customer feedback from a wide enough audience. Second, the regulatory environment is completely different, and a lot stricter in food for obvious reasons. Software doesn’t have a Best Before date, even if some software needs constant updating! Third, the fundamentals of product distribution play a massive role in determining the success of a food product – can you get it into the right stores at the right time and on the right shelf to sell well? Software can be sold direct (especially cloud software), it doesn’t need refrigeration or special packaging, and as mentioned above it can simply be erased when no longer needed, rather than requiring a complex disposal and/or recycling scheme. The huge investment risks and regulations in food also dictate that companies don’t have the luxury of just “trying things out” and waiting for customer feedback. Product managers therefore need to be aware of these larger and very different market forces. They need to learn the much more complicated intricacies of packaging and distribution. And they need to be a lot more mindful of the “code” – the ingredients – in food than they do if they were in software.
Q: What’s trending now in product management? Are there any new concepts to be aware of?
A: Yes, one is Design Thinking, a human-centered, empathy-first approach to creativity and innovation that should be an integral part of product development and management processes. It is a way of approaching problem solving that focuses on the user experience, rather than on the technical aspects of a project or product. Design Thinking allows for empathy, research, inspiration, iteration, and reduced ambiguity, making it easier to find the perfect point of intersection between desirability, feasibility, and viability. It helps product managers empathize with users and see their problems as they work to solve them. By applying empathy, defining a problem statement, ideating solutions, and prototyping and testing, product managers can drive innovation and improve the user experience of their products. AI is also everywhere, and we’re all trying to figure out how we can leverage AI to do our jobs more effectively. In product management, AI can be used to supplement market research, keep tabs on competitors, and analyze vast amounts of business data to spot trends and patterns. Other changes include a consumer focus on sustainability, which pushes product managers to consider the footprint of their products all along the supply chain; and more tech to get the job done, from roadmapping tools to voice of customer tools. The big unanswered question is what will be the longer-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on consumer tastes and wants?
Q: How does someone get into product management?
A: It used to be they came only from the technical side – individuals who can look at the business holistically. But you don’t have to be a chemist or food scientist to be a product manager. If you have great people in those roles already, a product manager can join the team, upscaling the whole group by bringing more business acumen, project management and execution functions. But they do need to be analytical and understand the science side. To learn more about becoming a product manager, in Vancouver there’s an annual conference called ProductCamp where you’ll meet product managers from all different industries. There are also opportunities for professional training – the Pragmatic Institute runs sessions in cities across North America and online, there’s the Association of International Product Marketing and Management, in Vancouver and Toronto there’s BrainStation, the UBC Sauder School of Business has a product management track, and there are a lot of online courses, such as ProductSchool.com.
Q: Do you have any other advice for CFIN members about product management and innovation?