Abstract
Product viability is the ability of a software product to maintain itself or recover its potentials. Product viability is determined by three dimensions. Viable products need to be profitable , implementable, and scalable. Profitable products are probably the primary objective for most organizations. Generally, software product profitability compares revenues versus product-related costs. Products need to be implementable as the ease of implementation determines the speed of adoption. Products need to be scalable as the ability to scale determines the product growth potential. This chapter describes in detail the Product Viability dimension that represents “The (Financial) Value-Based Part of the Software Product Manager Role.” The chapter explains the Product Viability dimension in much more detail, focusing on the techniques to assess, understand, monitor, and improve the financial and value-based part of the product manager role. I will introduce some of the tools, templates, and key performance indicators I used in my career, as well as the practices I learned and developed to assess and improve this important dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
The descriptions are short reviews from Sect. 2.2.1.
- 2.
Colleagues working on the standard customer business case asset might be in different departments, like Pre-sales, Marketing, or Value Engineering etc. However, I prefer to work directly with someone from the target user group that crafts those kinds of assets. The ones that will leverage the customer business case as part of the sales cycle are the best candidates to let you know what needs to be covered in the asset or what of information they need to build the asset on their own.
- 3.
For B2C products, frequently, but not always, the buyer and the user are the same person. Executive teams are not existent unless you consider spouses or parents that way.
- 4.
For internal products, your customer persona does not include a buyer. Still a customer business case is useful as it explains the expected financial and non-financial benefits that your product provides to a group of internal users of business units, subsidiaries, line of businesses, or your whole organization.
- 5.
Remember that we want to define a generic customer business case that reduces the workload of the product manager and can be tailored to any prospect in the target market segment.
- 6.
This kind of generic objective-benefit analysis could be used directly on your website, whether you offer a B2B, internal, or B2C product. The objective-benefit analysis is a simple self-service tool for your prospect customers.
- 7.
LOB = Line of Business, e.g. Sales, Marketing, Finance …
- 8.
More details about customer support and official customer references are described in Sect. 8.4.
- 9.
X being a placeholder for a reasonable number of opportunities that the team can handle; for example, we had a rule of supporting only two to three opportunities by one product manager at a given time.
- 10.
Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing funnel, product development, sales segments, and other areas of the business to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business (Growth hacking, 2019).
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Wagenblatt, T. (2019). Product Viability. In: Software Product Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19871-8_4
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