Research company Gartner found in a survey that only 55% of all product launches take place on schedule and that in the 45% of product launches that are delayed, 20%, on average fail to meet their internal targets.
In a report published by Gartner, the 2019 product manager survey revealed that several factors affect the delayed launch of a product including lack of formal launch processes, delays in product development (bugs, errors, feature creep), failure to meet customer requirements, product quality or even supply problems.
Adrian Lee, senior research director at Gartner said: “A product launch that meets all internal targets is seldom achieved. The survey showed that only 11% of organizations reported that all of their products met 100% of defined internal launch targets.”
“Product managers who run late with product launches need to be keenly aware that this situation will directly increase the risk of increasing the failure rates,” Lee added.
Meanwhile, product managers see themselves as responsible for the management of the launch and creating the strategy around products products as 46% of product managers said that they are responsible for managing the planning, development and introduction phases of a product while 39% of survey respondents said that their key responsibilities were creating a product strategy and planning and building product roadmaps.
However, 78% of product managers who viewed improving collaboration internally as one of their top three roles, experienced low product failure rates.
Stephanie Baghdassarian, senior research director at Gartner stated: “The product manager role is one of the most cross-functional in the organization. This is especially true at the product introduction phase when other functions such as marketing, sales, sales enablement and finance come into play.”
“However, the survey showed that fewer than 20% of organizations see their product managers as driving innovation or improving collaboration within the company,” Baghdassarian added.
Gartner said that product managers seeking to collaborate to drive business should ensure they communicate their product vision and roadmap across all the other stakeholders in the company. This, which should happen early on and repeatedly in the product life cycle, will allow possible revisions based on feedback gathered from stakeholders.
(Photo source: businesstoday.in/ revtechno.com)
