So I’m not sure if you are aware of it, but it turns out that all of the  people in the world can be divided into one of two different groups.  

These groups consist of people who like to get their morning coffee from  Dunkin and people who like to get their morning coffee from Starbucks. Traditionally once you’ve picked which group you want to belong to, you will never change your mind.  

The product managers at Dunkin have decided that they want to grow  their market and so they are preparing to change their product  development definition and do battle with the Starbucks product managers  in order to see if they can win some more customers over to their way  of doing coffee.

So before we dive into my tale of woe, let’s first make sure that we are  all on the same page at least in terms of vocabulary. 

When you lose a  job, there are a couple of different ways to have this happen. One is  that you get laid off. This generally happens when the company is forced  to reduce its workforce because they’ve run into financial problems or a  contract got canceled or they are closing a branch office. Multiple  people generally get laid off at the same time. You get the point. When you get fired, it’s a lot more personal.  Everyone else is still going to have their job but you are not. You  have been told that you are no longer wanted and you need to pack your  things up and get out. 

This is what happened to me. I got fired.

So where do you live today? 

The answer for a lot of us is in an  apartment. Now let’s go back and think about what it took to get you  into that apartment. First, of course, you had to find the apartment.  Then you had to find a way to get the stuff that you owned to the  apartment. Then it had to be put into the apartment. Finally, you spent  the next weeks, months, years unpacking and putting everything in the  place where it belonged. Wow – what an effort that was! 

If only there was an easier way to go about this moving into an apartment thing…

We should all have such problems. 

The product managers over at that  very, very successful company called Amazon are now facing a new  challenge. A while back Amazon paid US$13.5B to purchase the high-end grocery store chain called Whole Foods.  The Amazon product managers are now under the gun to change their  product development definition and apply what they have been able to do  so well for selling books and home goods to food. 

Just exactly how should they go about doing this?

How about a quick show of hands: who uses Microsoft Office every day? 

Hmm, I believe that I see just about everyone’s hands in the air. Let’s  face it, outside of the Microsoft Windows operating system, Microsoft Office is just about the most popular piece of software out there.  Sure, there are some competitors such as Google Office and Libra  Office; however, the biggest share of the market is owned by Microsoft  and has been for roughly the past 30 years or so. 

So why are the Microsoft product managers so slow to make improvements to Microsoft Office?

Just imagine if you were a product manager for Target stores. 

You would  be responsible for the success of a brand that has over 1,800 stores  sprinkled throughout suburban areas everywhere. However, you would have  recently bumped into some problems. Sales at your stores have just taken a dip for the first time in a couple of years.  It’s starting to look like you need to take some steps to change things  up and get more people to come to your stores if you want your product  manager resume to keep looking good. 

What are you going to have to do as  a product manager to get things back on track?

We all know the company General Electric – at one point in time, they  seemed to make just about everything that you could buy that could be  plugged in. 

These days GE is playing a game of catch up with other  companies. GE wants to be a player in the growing business of large-scale electricity storage.  The problem that their product managers are facing is that other  companies such as Tesla and Siemens already have a strong position in  this new business 

Looks like they are going to have to update their  product development definition and come up with a new product if they want to be competitive.

So let’s picture a typical evening for you. 

You get home from work, sort  through the mail, change clothes, click on the TV, and then you start  to think about dinner. Assuming that you have not gone crazy and called  up Uber Eats to deliver you some restaurant food, you are going to be on  the hook to create a meal for yourself.  If you have some chef skills this won’t be all that hard to do;  however, if you are like the rest of us you are going to be searching  around for something to eat. One  handy solution that a lot of us often go to is the so called “TV  Dinner” – a frozen meal that has all of the important parts of a dinner  such as vegetables, meat, and a desert. 

Is this a meal that product managers could once again make popular?

Being a product manager for a high-end jewelry company would be a pretty  good job to have. 

You really would not have to sell all that much of  your product in order to have a good year. However, these product  managers have started to run into a problem. It turns out that the next  generation of jewelry buyers, the millennials,  just don’t seem to be into the pretty, sparkly, things that you wear  every once-in-a-while. These are the things that their parents and  grandparents used to buy. 

What’s a product manager to do?

Just imagine if you were a product manager at one of the big technology  firms out there (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc.). 

You would  always be under pressure to change your product development definition  and come up with new and different ways for the company to make money.  You’d probably look at all of the different markets that your company’s  resources could be applied to looking for one where you could generate  the most money. In the end, you’d probably always come back to the world of finance – that’s where your company’s big computers could do a lot of good.  

However, what would you do if your biggest customers were already there?