Agile products require an understanding of the rules.
The current business and economic climate is forcing companies to develop, release and manage large numbers of increasingly customized offerings. Consumers demand more personalized products and intense competition means that product designs cannot remain static for long. You cannot conceive and design complex, information-rich products like insurance policies, credit offerings or telecommunications packages on paper. Equally, product managers can’t experiment with new configurations or design reusable packages of features directly into implementation environments. And dynamic markets and energetic competitors mean that ongoing change and maintenance must be fast and accurate.
To put product managers in charge and to empower them to design and maintain products that will win in the market you need a new approach. Product managers need a product specification and management environment that lets them work the way they want to work and that ensures consistency of definitions across products. The complexity of the product itself needs to be separated from the complexity of its implementation so that product managers can drive their products towards market success and understand the business implications of on-the-fly aggregations, customizations, changes and updates. Product managers need to be able to quickly and accurately define new and updated products – even one of a kind products for high value customers – and be sure they are right and will be profitable.