What is the significant difference between the responsibilities of a product manager and a project manager? Typically, a product manager is concerned with product life cycle management issues, which include sales performance data. Typically a product manager is more concerned with market and business issues than a project manager. A product manager is a primary contributor to a product's pricing strategy.

A product manager may request things that strain the schedule because of a belief that the adjustments will improve future sales. A project manager is likely to favor a strategy that maintains the schedule.

A successful product launch requires contributions from both product management and project management disciplines. Preparation for a product launch is a high stakes activity. Your company's success is often proportional to the success of your next product launch.

Product Launch Delays

When a product launch date is delayed because of either internal or external reasons (such as a new government regulation or other world/market events), a savvy team must find a way to retain control of the product launch. In such cases, team qualities such as innovativeness, domain expertise, and additional resource capacity will improve the potential success of the launch.

A few examples of the impact of a product launch delays include:

• Anticipated revenue from the new product sales is delayed
• Development resources are not available for other projects
• Additional stress results from re-scheduled events due to venue changes, travel plans, communication efforts, and other schedule conflicts.
• Additional effort to manage customer expectations

The product announcement date drives the daily decisions of multiple projects. Decision makers familiar with formal project management principles may develop a risk management plan to manage risk systematically and efficiently.

"Before implementing a risk management plan, the risk manager must first learn to perceive risk in every aspect of doing business and offering services…The most hazardous risk impacts occur when individuals are not aware of potential problems…” Papageorge, T. E., Risk Management for Building Professionals, R. S. Means Company, 1988

Launch Strategy

Preparation for a product launch requires making decisions today that determine how successful you will be at product launch. Factors that influence product launch can be segmented as:

• Time (which includes the duration of the development effort and competitive influences)
• Resources (such as money/cost, people, and tools)
• Scope (which includes the product definition and features)
• Quality (which includes the customer satisfaction and the number of product defects)

These factors are not independent. Each factor influences the other three. A change in any of these factors will influence the success of the product launch.

If you spend too little time in development, the product quality may suffer. If you spend too much time, an excessive amount of your resources may be expended. If the scope of your product exceeds what the market requires, inappropriate resources may be expended and the product launch will probably be delayed. If the scope of your product does not satisfy customers, sales revenue will suffer.

Preparations for product launch include forecasting. Management may ask questions like:

• What activities (plans and deliverables) will produce the bottom-line impact projected for the new product that is six months from release?
• Have resources been allocated properly to the new product launch and our other business interests?

Unfortunately, product launch activities are not real-time activities with immediate feedback.

• The impact of the work done early in product development is greatest during product distribution.
• The financial rewards from a mediocre product launch in comparison to a great product launch (where the time and money parameters during product development were equal) can be vastly different. Often, companies congratulate themselves for a product launch that produced mediocre results.
• In themselves, typical milestones such as releasing the product, presenting the product at a trade show, and creating a press release do not reflect the effectiveness of the product launch. Often, the success of a product launch is not determined by the percentage of the items completed on a checklist. A bad checklist will not produce a good product launch. A good checklist does not guarantee a good product launch.
• Choosing the right priorities before the product launch event and making the appropriate dynamic adjustments throughout the product development phase will produce optimum results.

Successfully developing and launching a new product required the coordination among many sub-projects (such as the discrete projects of writing the code, pricing the product, and promotion). For example, a software product may benefit from a software development project manager. However, launch success is maximized when the contributions from other developers (for example, the contributions of a training development specialist) complement each other. Synergy among all developers can be difficult in matrix organizations and networked teams. Typically, the product manager is the person that coordinates the contributions from several functional areas within a company to prepare for a product launch.

The approach we advocate to develop a launch design is called Launch Architecture. It provides a system-level design to guide a collaborative development team’s vision of how a diverse set of contributions will fit together to fulfill the needs of end users, buyers, distributors, and retailers. Under these conditions, implementation is efficient and cost-benefit analyses are representative of system objectives.

Additional information is presented in the Consulting Services section.