A Product in Product Management

What is a product in product management?

Not every product delivers value, but every product provides opportunities. Opportunities (like functions or features) have no value in and of themselves. Therefore, the goal of the product owner and well-built product management is to create an opportunity and help users realize these opportunities. 

Successful product management can result in innovation and business growth. Product management should be strongly tied to the voice of the customer to build the best possible product.

Music streaming service Spotify is a great example of a product that delivers multiple unique opportunities to its users. It lets them access an extensive music library at a low-cost, receive personalized playlists based on their preferences, store music offline, and stream music on their web and mobile platforms. Spotify converted these opportunities into values after defining their target audience and appealing to their needs. 

Netflix is another great example. Netflix gives users access to quality entertainment 24/7. The service has a huge catalog of content, streams without ads, and offers personalized recommendations.

How do you define a product?

Products can be tangible goods, services, experiences, individuals, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas. 

Products that are physical things are often called goods. A classic example would be a bag of sugar, a can of beans, or a car.

Products that aren’t physical entities are usually called services. Examples of services can include education, consulting, or marketing strategy development. 

However, each product always contains both physical and non-physical components, so there are no goods and services in pure form.

What are the three types of products?

There are multiple ways to categorize products, but one of the most standard ways is to split them up into three types:

1. Consumer Products — these are purchased by customers without a goal to reuse or resale them. Consumer products can be further divided into convenience, shopping, speciality, and unsought products.

2. Industrial Products — these are used to create other products or manage specific systems or businesses. Industrial products are usually raw materials, parts, major equipment, accessory equipment, or operating supplies.

Services — these represent a mixture of consumer and industrial products. They can also be divided into subcategories including a pure service, a major service with accompanying minor goods and services, a tangible good with accompanying service, and a pure tangible product.

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