Product Market – A Model for Large Organizations

The other day, along with a colleague from operations, I was reviewing the requirements related to a module in the Flight Information product I manage. My colleague raised a question about enhancing a feature which could benefit another product used in operations to manage allocation of tasks for ground handling agents thereby optimizing the utilization of staff and an expensive set of equipment used in the airport.

Since both of us were familiar with both the products, we could discuss and debate on the pros and cons about the enhancement and eventually came up with a potentially feasible solution. We highlighted this to the respective operations heads and now the change is being pursued for viability and if approved will head towards implementation.

This simple incident reminded me of the power of product knowledge, especially across multiple products. This is important in large organizations where product managers tend to focus merely on their products and their roadmaps rather than having effective conversations with their colleagues to figure out the possibilities of making various products talk to each other and realize mutual benefits.

We live in a world where most product managers await the steer from business owners to state their need, get them documented as a new feature and get going with implementation. If integration with another system is identified as part of the change, converations start flowing in that direction. Rarely do we drive conversations the other way round.

Large organizations typically have hundreds or thousands of products across various operational areas. Each of these products boast of their own features and capabilities that support respective businesses. While it is impossible for a product manager to know every feature and data element available in all systems in the company, just imagine the possibilities if you have a clear visibility of the information set offered by all other products in your organisation.

The idea does not have to stop there. To support your thought process, visualize your fellow product managers sharing with you the features and data elements of their products and give you scenarios of how those data can be used in your product. These could potentially open endless doors of ideas for you leading to ways by which these products could talk to each other thereby adding tremendous value to the respective business teams.

I would love to think about this concept coming to fruition as a ‘Product Market’ in an organization. Product managers can ‘set up shop’ showcasing the features and data elements available from their products. They can also advise how the ‘potential customers’ who are fellow product managers, can use the data for their products. Use cases which were not identified earlier, could be the outcome of this Product Market directly leading to a ready list of ideas enriching the backlogs.

One bonus value a Product Market could bring in, is to identify products which have overlapping features and thereby plan for better optimization by eliminating duplicates. The cost savings for the organization could be quite high if we could remove such redundancies.

Here is a toast to the awesome product folks out there who could think beyond their products and add significant value to their users!