Sam Somashekar

Successful alignment is less about process and more about calibrating buyer value. Learn about the five dimensions that top organizations align on — and learn more at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America.

Product managers must keep an eye on the long-term prize for their offerings. Learn how — and dive deeper at Forrester's B2B Summit North America.

Now more than ever, product managers must deeply understand their customers. With digital transformation efforts rampant, competitors coming online faster, and customer experience expectations rising, the standard practice of customer-needs discovery can’t keep up with this fast pace of change. In addition, customer demands are evolving rapidly — if you blink, you may miss them […]

Digital offerings are accelerating, and companies expect them to drive organizational growth and customer centricity. The role of digital product management and its responsibilities ensure continued long-term success of digital offerings.

Product strategy, along with marketing and sales strategy, must be a part of the overall business strategy. That alignment is critical to ensuring product-led growth; without it, aspirations on market share or how the organization will win can be short-sighted and product teams may wonder what their role is in reaching business goals.

Product portfolio management is a major responsibility for product management leaders, but it’s often approached in a disjointed, ad hoc manner that can cause confusion for teams, customers, and buyers.

Product managers must integrate design thinking into their product commercialization and lifecycle process to foster a customer-focused approach for offerings. Otherwise they risk being too internally focused and out of touch with the market segments they serve. Sam Somashekar shares the top three tips to help integrate design thinking principles into product management activities to ensure commercial success of your products.

• Many companies provide services as part of their portfolio of offerings, but few manage them with the same rigor as products
  
• Companies often miss out on commercial opportunities when they offer ad hoc services and one-off implementations that could be delivered more consistently and profitably if productized
  
• Organizations have the opportunity to improve the quality and profitability of their services by following the SiriusDecisions Service-as-a-Product Framework

• The premise of agile is to integrate continuous improvement of usable chunks of a project through an iterative approach
• Opportunities to apply agile practices exist in product management even when product development operates within waterfall methodologies
• Operationalizing agile practices will turn product management leaders into agile change agents and promote further adoption within product development