Centralization - The Key to Effective Product Management

In today’s Communication Service Provider (CSP) market, services are treated like commodities, competition is driving down prices, and differentiation is more difficult to achieve. Increasingly, the market is looking for innovation and quality to deliver customer-driven, on-demand services through:

• centralized product and service catalog
• effective management of many bundles, products and services across multiple network layers and technologies
• improved customer experience 
• enhanced speed to market for new products
• reduced operational cost
• facilitation of a 360° view of the customer and the product

When communications services were few on the ground and evolved slowly it was okay to have a manual approach to product management. But in today’s brutally competitive market, with new products rolling out frequently plus bundles and options changing daily, product management has to move into the 21st century.

What do you think?

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Hello,

 

well the real challenge here is when we a add global presence to that mix, because not all your services/products will be available for all the countries, which will make the job of maintaining a centralized product and service catalog very hard, and I see a more local service catalog more efficient, correct me if I’m wrong?

 

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be integration between service catalogs, but from my point of view a more managed strict service catalog will limit the diversity of products and technologies offered but on the other hand a badly managed product catalog can cause allot of problems during implementation. what is better is a not so strict yet flexible service catalog that allow for a faster change process, to eliminate old legacy product that no longer in use and maintain the cutting edge technology products, and that will be better managed in a localized environment, to allow the test for new technologies to be accurate, and to eliminate legacy services easier.

 

On the other hand if you involve customer in the product development process, you can improve both the customer experience and enhance the speed to market for new products, that could be achieved only by a complex business unite that will support complex customer requests that are not considered as a standard service, and put together a business process that support tailored solutions

 

While you need to manage your customer’s expectations in terms of what services/solution can you offer, the speed at which the service will be available and the reliability of such services/solution, and still hit or exceed your target profitable gross!!

 

 

A centralized product and service catalog will make it possible to know the scope of existing product portfolio. It will allow mapping of existing products with competition's offerings and identification of gaps. Innovation would be required to identify a lucrative gap and design/enhance products to tap the market. It will be possible to bundle products together to create attractive offerings. It will allow easy comparison of products within the portfolio and judgment of their acceptance with the customers. The products which are not doing well can be tweaked or harvested.The classification of the catalog along with the ability to search, group, rate, and tag various items in the catalog will decide its success. If it is easy for people to find on-demand solutions through the catalog it will be a definite success.

Involving customers in the product development process is a very attractive proposition but how do we propose to manage the customization required at the level of each customer. Is it possible to achieve such levels or should we look at the ability of identifying the opinion leaders with a system that provides the ability to rate such contributors and their contributions. Assuming that all the customers rate such contributions, we can identify the top few and implement them for a pilot.

This new extremely competitive market is so customer driven that every activity in a business organisation is getting customer centric. The approach to increasing customer base, roll out product and services offering options and managing both needs innovation and faster response. Centralized product and service catalog helps in more ways than one. More importantly businesses seek more and more information on their customers. Everybody wants to know more about their customers to enhance the overall experience of the customers. Centralized approach helps gather decision making data, helps in understanding trends and preferences, gives richer experience to customers, enables sales and marketing teams to offer a range of bundles, run promotions etc without having to worry about the internal readiness. This in turn enables the businesses to forecast the future outlook and market dynamics and take futuristic decisions. On the cost side it helps improve speed to market, reduce operational costs, reduce new product offering costs etc. On the revenue side it provides flexibility to manage revenues through dynamic offerings by bundling, changing offers, offering short term promotions etc. In simple words the outcome is as follows:

1. Improves readiness of the business to handle changes
2. Better control over product and service offerings
3. Better knowledge on customer's taste and preferneces
4. Reduction in various costs
5. Improvement in revenues by capitalizing on dynamism of the system in service offerings and repeat sales due to enhanced user experience
6. Brand Building.
7. Customer Support channels are better equipped with support knowledge and internal processes.

I’m a little bet confused here, how much centralized are we talking about here, I work in a place with centralized products/processes putting together 255 countries under one set of processes and products, to be honest we have flexibility for large accounts and by large I mean account bringing in more then 50,000 million ERUs but still if the organization will be less centralized we can expand our customer base to reach the more smaller customer.

 

On the other hand I see less centralized company do work much easier, the more centralized is not always the better, from where I see it we are to an extent strict in our products/service.

 

We can always involve the customer in the product development simply visa tailored surveys or moving to a more complex approach for giving the customer exactly what he ask for, making sure that the organization can handle any Request for Proposal thrown at it, and to achieve this a more aggressive market watch and product/service development is required

The Route to acheiving real product management sanity requires components, each individually delivering core value along the way.Implementing these components is like buliding a five-lane superhighway.The destination-innovation and porfitability-is no longer in question.it is how you get there and use it in the end that counts.
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sandy romeo

BUZZ MARKETING