As a product manager or leader in PM, you find yourself facing the challenges of economic turbulence. The instability in the economy creates uncertainty, reshapes priorities, and puts pressure on decision-making. It’s important to acknowledge that the current economic conditions require a reassessment of core aspects of product strategy. The approaches listed here are already in your tool kit as part of standard PM practices, however they are worth revisiting with a twist to navigate these uncertain times.
1. Refine Strategic Options
Given the compounding pressures generated by economic instability, it’s crucial to revisit your strategic options. Understand the goals of your CEO, Board and Leadership team. There are always 3 main drivers to balance against:
- REVENUE to support marketing and sales acquire, and close new prospects.
- REACH, to open up new markets and up-selling and
- RETENTION to prevent churn and keep existing customers happy and expanding.
Within the lens of these priorities, you must also think about COST and MARGINS. So take the time to evaluate the “build, buy, and partner” decisions for your products. Assess whether the existing strategy aligns with the current economic landscape and make adjustments as needed. Consider alternative options in partnership with Engineering, such as co-creation or outsourcing, to reduce development costs and time to market.
2. Grow Your Partner Ecosystem
While technology partnerships are typically in the PMs domain with a focus on improving product capabilities. You can extend REACH by working with your alliances team, to leverage competitive intelligence to identify potential acquisition or partnership opportunities that can enhance your product or increase market share. It’s your responsibility to identify players and potential partners in the marketplace. Once engaged with a partner, use tools like Crossbeam and Reveal to find overlapping customers with potential partners – they have versions that you can get started for free! You can create “better together” synergies and capabilities without doing any product integration to start. In tandem, you can also have discussions with your customers via a Product Council or engage through Customer Success as they conduct Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to find other products and potential partners that your customers use.
3. Reprioritize Your Product Portfolio
In times of economic turbulence, effective portfolio management becomes even more critical. Reprioritize investments across your product portfolio to ensure resilience and future growth. While budget cuts may be necessary, avoid sacrificing the innovation pipeline entirely. Slow down investments but maintain critical new product development efforts. Revisit marginally performing products and evaluate whether an earlier end-of-life is necessary. Focus on driving standardization to reduce costs for both your organization and customers. Utilize product analytics tools such as Heap or Pendo to identify less-used features and deprioritize them accordingly. Remember it’s just an important to say NO and to make the tough choices as a PM, as it is to bring new and exciting offerings to market
4. Find Revenue Opportunities via Updated Pricing & Packaging
While cuts are occurring and budgets are tight in your customer base, it may seem counter-intuitive to examine the possibility of increasing prices. Depending on your organizational structure, pricing and packaging could very well be owned by your Product Marketing team. If that’s the case it still behooves you to partner with them, as well as your finance and operations team to model the impact of potential price increases and repackaging to unlock additional revenue, as well to better enforce discounting discipline in partnership with sales. This is potential very low hanging fruit, if you’ve not raised prices in a while. Your early customers likely have products at a very high discount rate, and if you’ve evolved your product you no doubt have significant additional ROI and value drivers that can help you justify a higher price. I’ve managed to successfully help companies I’ve worked for increase revenue and margin via new pricing and packaging. Companies such as Profitwell (acquired by Paddle) or Pricing.io can help via a structured process to understand the new price points and packaging that you can rollout with confidence. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss effective techniques that can be used.
5. Embrace New Skills and Up your Cross-functional Game
The current economic landscape presents talent scarcity and reduced hiring and training budgets. Your skills as a PM, and overall talent management in your product teams becomes a crucial focus. Consider up-skilling and empowering yourself and your team to expand your business and technical knowledge. Align your efforts on revenue generating endeavors by helping Sales in deals where roadmap and your PM credibility can influence. Support Customer Success with clear and thoughtful listening to customer requests, and roadmap alignment. Help marketing by creating strong technical content that can be used in blog posts, webinars and to influence analysts. Finally, ABC, Always Be Connecting here on LinkedIn to spread the word of your product, and to network and find fruitful partnerships. Continue to think of yourself as the CEO of your product area. Humble brag about your “baby”, much like you would a proud parent, every little bit helps create an impression in the market.
6. Leverage Purpose-Built Tools
While it seems contrary to ask to spend money on new tools, while the company is cutting costs. To optimize your product management processes and reduce time and effort overhead, evaluate and adopt purpose-built tools. Consider tools specifically designed for roadmapping, product analytics, and customer experience optimization. Modern roadmapping tools like AHA, ProductBoard or ProductPlanprovide a centralized source of truth for your product vision and strategy. Partner with analytics solutions to accelerate the adoption of product analytics and gain valuable insights. Leverage user experience tools and platforms to engage with customers and gain valuable feedback. You’ll need to be very clear about the ROI, and increased savings in other areas of headcount and resourcing to justify the spend.
As a product manager or leader, you possess the resilience and adaptability needed to navigate economic turbulence. By reevaluating your strategic options, expanding your partner ecosystem, reprioritizing your portfolio, revisiting pricing & packaging, embracing new skills, and leveraging purpose-built tools, you can optimize your product management approach even in challenging times. Remember to balance short-term actions with long-term plans through scenario planning. Stay proactive, agile, and customer-focused to thrive amidst economic uncertainty. You have the skills and determination to lead your products to success, no matter the economic conditions.