Susan Paley

Make sure you understand the nature of the setbacks and delays. Are they issues deriving from the designs themselves? Are you getting early signals that there are issues/complexities with the designs that will be impact your ability to produce the product in scale production? Setbacks and delays if they stem from the design itself are a good opportunity for another round of DFM(design for manufacturing). If the setbacks and delays are not a result of the design but can be directly attributed to internal or external resources not executing correctly, this is an opportunity to rethink these resources and make any necessary changes.

Product management is an essential role yet complicated by conflicting definitions, roles and responsibilities that vary from organization to organization. Startups and large orgs often view the role differently. It is one of the hardest hires as it encompasses so many aspects of the product lifecycle. One of the best ways to learn it is to work for a large organization that excels that building and launching products in areas of interest to you. This is where you can learn best practices that you can then adapt and apply to your own journey.

Prioritization and focus is critical for early stage companies and much easier to articulate than actualize. Often times too many project are labeled “high priority” conveying urgency when it reality most of them are important but can be prioritized down the stack. This is especially in larger organizations, when “high priority” is often a political tool to secure resources. When labeling projects “high priority” be sure they are worthy of that classification.

Here are a few additional thoughts: -Make sure you have a clear test plan that is commensurate with the fidelity of each prototype version. This way users can test prototypes for the specific functionality that is mapped to the product iteration. -In addition to focused test plans let users test prototypes “in the wild” or as they see fit. Asking users to use prototypes as they see fit reveals potential reliability or performance issues emanating from expanded use cases and unintended environments. Caught early, these issues turn into opportunities to strengthen the product offering. -Make sure there is a feedback loop that accurately captures user testing data and disseminates it to the those who can act on it.

The goal of inventory forecasting for any industry is to move from an art based model meaning mostly hopeful guesswork to a science backed methodology. Personalization, super charged from advances in ML and AI, is ushering a new era of personal and contextual marketing that can deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time. The result will be much higher conversion rates, better, richer customer data and analytics that illuminate pattern recognition. In short personalization will help move the needle for inventory forecasting closer to the science end of the curve. Companies like @getrepeat.io, focused on smart replenishment, are on the forefront of this new era of personalization.

People think marketers and marketing agencies build brands but in reality customers build brands. Every customer that becomes an evangelist tells the brand story on their terms when he/she/they talks about the product experience and what it means to them.