Ah, to be a product manager at Coke-Cola. 

Would that not be the best job  ever? Coke is a huge company, it has a very large market share, and  every customer that you might ever want to capture has already heard  about about your product. What more could a product manager ask for?  Coke has been focused on creating sugary drinks even as the rest of the world started to shift its drinking habits to water and healthier options.  Coke’s sales were starting to stall and this called for a change in  their product development definition. 

What could their product managers  do to turn things around?

When it comes time to ship a product to a customer, product managers in  the U.S. know that they have three different options: the Postal  Service, FedEx, and UPS. 

FedEx and UPS generally cost more, but they are fiercely competitive and if you hand  your package off to them, you know that it will reach where it is  supposed to go. 

However, it turns out that UPS has been running into  some problems and their product managers are going to have to get creative to solve them.

There are exciting product manager jobs and then there are the product manager jobs at the really big food companies.  

Yes, yes – the good news is that you’ll probably be a relatively  successful product manager no matter what you do simply because the big  food companies provide us with the products that we all know and love.  However, because of the sameness of the job, there is a good chance that  this will not be the most exciting product manager job out there.  

However, lately things have been changing and this job is starting to become a lot more cutting edge…

Sigh. As product managers we all would like to think of ourselves as  being the person who is in charge of a cool product like Facebook or the  iPhone. 

However, the world is filled with other products that need the  help of product managers and so who’s to say what product we will  eventually be put in charge of? One product that perhaps none of us would look forward to managing would be adult diapers.  I mean, nobody really wants to buy this product, right? 

What’s the best  way for a product manager to deal with a product that people need, but  don’t want?

As product managers, we all spend our time trying to better understand  what our customers really want. 

This can be a tricky thing to do. We  need to understand what motivates our customers in order to better  understand how we can provide them with the products that they will be  willing to buy. Product managers at some of the largest companies out  there, Amazon, Walmart, and Target, have decided that being able to  deliver products that customers have ordered the next day is the best  way to attract more customers. 

Just exactly how are they going to go  about doing this?

Imagine for a moment that you were a product manager working at  Starbucks. 

The company is growing, everyone likes your product, you  would be on top of the world. In fact, Starbucks has opened over 2,000  cafes in the U.S. over the past three years. The result of this rapid  growth has been that you can find a Starbucks just about anywhere.  However, the downside to all of this growth is that their traffic growth is starting to slow. 

What is a Starbucks product manager to do?

Quick quiz: where have you been eating your meals lately? 

Perhaps a  better version of this question would be: how many times have you eaten  at home lately? If you are like most of us, your answer is going to be  mixed. Yeah, you might grab a breakfast at home, but do you take your  lunch to work? How about dinner – do you eat at home or go out? 

Since you are not eating at home as much as you should, you are starting to cause problems for packaged food product managers.

So here’s a quick question for you: what’s the most important meal of  the day? 

If you said breakfast, then the product managers at Wendy’s would agree with you. Wendy’s has decided to once again make an attempt  to expand their product development definition and start to offer  breakfast items in an effort to attract more customers to their stores  in the morning. 

The market for breakfast foods is a crowded market and  the Wendy’s product managers may be up against some stiff competition: how can they be successful?

When you travel and you need transportation at the other end of your  trip, what do you do? 

If you are like most of us, when you are buying  your airplane ticket and making your hotel reservation you go ahead and  call up an established rental car company and make a reservation. When  you fly into the airport, you take the car rental bus to the car rental  lot, pick up your car and you drive away. That’s all fine, but that is  so old school. 

It turns our that there is a new way to get around and it’s changing the rental car product development definition and  causing headaches for established rental car company product managers.

The Amazon product managers have a real problem on their hands. 

They are  in charge of one of the more popular brands in the world and the  creation of their Amazon Prime service has only made the company even  more popular. However, as we are all aware of, what you did for me  yesterday is nice, but what I’m really interested in is what you will be  doing for me tomorrow. The Amazon product managers are under a lot of  pressure to continue to update their product development definition and keep growing the brand.  

One part of the world where Amazon would like to become bigger is  Britain. What the product managers need is a way to hook more customers.