Hi Sachin,

Here’s a sampling of the product management MBA syllabus that you will most likely see in many of the top courses.

Folks working in the software industry might be familiar with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This is a specialised implementation of the broader discipline of product development. Every product goes through a typical life cycle – ideation, product design, engineering, testing, launch.

However this is only one part of the process. There’s a parallel track that has to support this and it happens in the area of marketing. There’s no point in creating a wonderful product that no one is going to use. That brings us to the new course that you’ll come across if you take up an MBA in product management.
Advanced Marketing Planning

This again is a bunch of activities that involves understanding what the market really wants. Is the new product filling a gap in the market or is it generating a new demand? For instance, when Gmail came out, it was not the first free email product. But if offered something that the existing free email services didn’t offer.

While the engineering team at Google fine-tuned the technology behind Gmail, there was also a marketing team planning on how to market the product before and after it was launched.

Every single product has a consumer. So it’s only natural that you know what the consumer wants before spending millions of dollars on the product. What prompts the consumer to choose one product over another. Is it the aesthetics, or the function, or the brand, or a combination of these and other aspects. These inputs can go a long way in ensuring that the new product development is happening in a synchronised and well-directed manner.

This is the analytical part of the process. Not everyone in the product management team needs to be a pro at everything. If you are good at gathering, analysing and presenting data in a way that can provide invaluable insights to the rest of the product management teams, you can be a crucial contributor.

This is where things start moving into the niche zone. You can’t market an iPhone like a Gucci bag. Or maybe you can. Most high-tech products rely a detailed feature listing comparing 3 other competing products in a bid to prove how they are better than the options available in the market.

Others focus on the image or an emotion to send the message across. This is where the dependency on Consumer behaviour comes back into picture. Depending on your target buyer, you could tweak your marketing strategy.

Blackberry was initially positioned as a high-end phone for the professional. All the marketing initiatives projected a serious, no-nonsense image. Then they re-positioned themselves (to gain a bigger market share) and there was re-branding exercise where they tried to show that it wasn’t just meant for the serious professional.

In most cases, pricing (how much the consumer pays) isn’t purely a function of the cost (how much the company spent on bringing it to market). Pricing plays a big role in positioning the product.

I can’t find the article where I read this. But apparently the same condom manufacturer supplies to Nirodh (the government brand) as well as to several premium brands. The quality is the same but difference in pricing is huge. Of course, the premium brands spend more on advertising and marketing, but they still make big margins on the same product.