20 April, 2022

 

Versatile Product / Project Consultant  – 30 years of exposure

With an emphasis on System Integration with Man-Machine Interfaces

Please do not miss reading Mike Rana’s technical profile enclosed  

The head of product should work very closely with the engineering department, design, sales, and marketing to deliver the business’s product into the market. Particularly all products with financial repercussions must interact with accounts and audits, making sure that micro-audit requirements will be implemented in the product delivered. And those with legal requirements should work with the legal department of the company.

Normally a vendor is focused on his way of doing things, polishing his own perceived user requirements, following a predetermined strategy of doing things, coming unfortunately to a level where the product specifications don’t match harmoniously with the business user requirements. And then starts a quick and haphazard transformation of the database and its structures.

This is why and where the vendors lose their excellence and reputation.

Traditionally product management expects a product designer to put together cross-functional internal teams that deliver unique and focused experiences of governing the life cycle of a product, with an avenue for future expansions.

As a great product/offering manager, one would be expected to manage the needs of the end-user clients and their business requirements which could sometime mean working with external business partners to make the offered solution work. A proper market evaluation of the product specifications being offered is needed to perpetually redefine the native product specifications. Meeting the deadlines might certainly involve working simultaneously on different versions of the same product with minor but specific differences.

In my opinion, all activities related to Product Management, therefore, require a complete understanding of the product specification along with the business user requirements. It needs among other things a seamless integration of man-machine interfaces of the product in relation to the other products of the suite offered to clients. And the structure of the underlying databases must be changeable at will, meaning even when the product is delivered to the customer. In other words, always an end-to-end solution must be offered.

This is sometimes ignored and it leads to lopsided product development and grave irrecoverable losses.

The developed products must implement a good man-machine interface so that the end-users can operate seamlessly, particularly in cross multi-vendor systems, making sure that no redundancy of data causes any inconsistency. If required data migration must be carried out.

Finally, the up-gradation of a product to a different version should not lead to too many updates in a year. Keeping upward compatibility is of prime importance, but it should not get out of the company policies of charging for the product. Managing a product roadmap should be guided by these policies.

(Mike Rana)

References

• artzib@gmail.com    Independent Computer Software Professional and a partner at Afterdox
• yuval.dayan9@gmail.com  System analyst at Darya Adv. Solutions