It’s an exciting time to work in product management. The demand for digital offerings, many of which require a strong product management practice, has increased rapidly. Product managers have access to more data than ever, and the ability to evolve and improve digital offerings based on customer response is easier than ever. But the challenges have also compounded, as customers now expect even the most complex offerings to be easy to use, quickly deliver value, have highly effective onboarding and support, and improve quickly based on customer feedback.
In the near future, product teams will face these opportunities and challenges in the context of a potential recession. Product leaders can help ensure teams and their offerings remain highly competitive by focusing on the most efficient approaches to growth, leveraging available data, potential partners, and the product itself to drive customer acquisition and retention. and the general health of the business.
This year, Forrester has created a series of planning guides to ensure product leaders make the best investment decisions in 2023. Here are some of the recommendations we make for product leaders as they move forward. start planning for next year.
- Where to invest: To best support offering growth, product management leaders must provide the tools necessary for product teams to understand how customers are using their offerings and ensure those teams know how to analyze data and leverage the findings to guide decisions. investment decisions. For example, now is the time to invest in product experience and engagement platforms. These platforms—tools and solutions used to onboard customers and collect and centralize feedback—provide the data needed to weigh the investment trade-offs for adding or changing features and information on how to make offerings more user-friendly. However, Forrester’s 2022 Budget Pulse survey indicates that only 12% of B2B product managers plan to increase investment in this type of technology by more than 10%.
- Where to show moderation: Product managers, owners, and development teams often focus on introducing new features and functions without evaluating the value they can bring. Limit spending to the features that create the most value, and make sure the enhancements you offer don’t offset your efforts to create a simple, easy-to-use product.
- Where to experience: Consumption-based pricing has been very popular in recent years. A 2021 report from OpenView shows that 45% of SaaS companies have a usage-based component in their pricing model, a two-fold increase in adoption compared to just four years earlier. Try to add consumer pricing elements to your model, as the flexibility will be attractive to some buyers during a recession. Be careful, however, not to overinvest in more transactional customers if your cost structure assumes recurring revenue business. You’ll quickly discover that transactional revenue doesn’t match the investments you’ve made to create a customer-obsessed experience.
Explore Forrester’s 2023 planning guide for data-driven insights on where to invest, where to retire, and where to stay the course. here.
This post was written by Vice President and Research Director Lisa Singer and originally appeared here.
