Analysis for decision making in IT product development

Abstract

In the competitive world of Information Technology, there are many aspects which play an important role for the existence of an organization. Some of these firms develop a certain suite of products, which can be used by the end users for their needs, and some others provide a suite of services to their customers, in whatever domain they require it. The former business of developing products is known as the Product Development. In IT industry, in general, there are many products being developed without much of analysis or enough of the analysis from the previous customer received data. Many business decisions in product development miss the basic fact that the previous releases or the earlier versions of the product are the best indicators of the requirements for the newer versions. A good amount of Analysis of the Customer Usage patterns and the type of errors/bugs they face has to be done. There is no lack of Data available for analysis on the product future releases. There is a perspective of a Product Manager, which play a major role in the feature incorporation. However, the main focus for the Product Manager should be on the major features which would of some sort of higher Lifetime Value for the end customer. This is what needs to be mainly done by product management team in the organization. Product management as a discipline is about what the product should be. Product managers are advocates for the customer s needs and desires. A large IT product might have numerous product managers working towards its success at a variety of levels, all the way from the junior product manager writing specifications about single feature sets to a product strategy director who has overall responsibility to executive management for the product direction. According to Kotler and Keller in their definition, a product manager s responsibilities include the following:? Developing a long-range and competitive strategy for the product.? Preparing an annual marketing plan and sales forecast.? Working with advertising and merchandising agencies to develop copy, programs, and campaigns.? Increasing support of the product among the sales force and distributors.? Gathering continuous intelligence on the product's performance, customer and dealer attitudes, and new problems and opportunities.? Initiating product improvements to meet changing market needs. The main areas of Challenge here are to collect the data for the product's performance, reliability and features, and build certain the patterns around that. Again, a lot of times, it is not a simple task to collect the Customer attitudes as well as the Dealer s comfort levels towards the given product. It also involves a lot of focus on the new problems and opportunities.