D3 Discover – Product Management

D3 Discover: Product Management is tailored to the systematic search and market test of products and services. This module is central to product management and has to consider innovation principles, customer characteristics as well as technological insight.

In 1986 Peter Drucker has shown in his book „Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, that most new products are identified by creative thinking. He also showed that this is very risky since most of this initiatives fail. For this reason we also employ systematic methodologies to identify innovation based on your business experience. Sometimes the combination of apparently contradicting features, target audiences and situations leads to success.

We think that right from the start of a product a very clear understanding of expectations on the revenue and its generators should exist. Also, the risks of the introduction of new product should be assessed since this could impact most business matters.

It should be mandatory to understand the opinion of users prior to launch since a lot of development cycles fail because a technically superb product or service goes not deliver, what users want. We use different methodologies to involve users such as user panels or personas. In case of user interfaces as with consumer internet sites for instance, high-end prototypes should be used to do so.

Last but not least this module must include checkpoints which ensure that only developments are ordered from engineering which improve profitability and the user experience. Again, Peter Drucker was right with stating: “Do the right things” instead of “do things right”.