Software product management – An industry evaluation

• Product management is a key success factor for software products.
• Industry experiences from 15 organizations on product management practices.
• Four success factors are identified for implementing software product management.
• Institutionalization of the role measurably improves the success rate of projects.

Product management is a key success factor for software products as it spans the entire life-cycle and thus ensures both a technical and business perspective. With its many interfaces to various business processes and stakeholders across the life-cycle, it is a primary driver for requirements engineering in its focus on value-orientation and consistency across releases. This article provides an overview on product management in software and IT. It summarizes experiences with introducing, improving and deploying the role of a product manager. In order to get a profound industry overview we performed a field study with interviews and concrete insight across fifteen different organizations world-wide on the role of the product manager and its success factors. As a technical solution we present four success factors identified from the research and show how they address the challenges we identified in practice. The novel part of this research and technical study is the industry survey and evaluation of resulting solution proposals. We found that with increasing institutionalization of a consistent and empowered product management role, the success rate of projects in terms of schedule predictability, quality and project duration improves.