The product managers at Amazon have a big problem on their hands. 

The  company, which is already huge, wants to keep on growing. What this  means for the product managers is that they always have to be looking for new businesses that Amazon can expand into.  

They think that they may have come up with one that could, over time,  make a substantial contribution to the company’s bottom line: a new line of grocery stores.

Retail giants Amazon and Walmart really, really want to start selling a  great deal in India. 

In fact, they are willing to spend billions to set  up shop there. However, their success is not guaranteed.  It turns out that they are going to be battling the countless number of  mom-and-pop stores that are already there and these stores are not  going away any time soon. 

How is this battle going to sort itself out?

In the world of shopping in bulk, you have choices. 

Specifically, when  you need a huge amount of toilet paper or paper towels, you can choose  to go to either Sam’s Club or Costco. Where do you choose to go? If you are like most people,  if you have a choice you generally choose go to Costco. It’s not clear  why we make this choice. I suspect that one of the reasons is because  Sam’s Club is so closely tied to Walmart that most of us really don’t  want to go there. You would think that the Sam’s Club product managers would have a real challenge on their hands when they  went to China. 

However, it turns out that was not a problem.

Let’s face it: Amazon is a very big company and they have done a lot of  different things very well. 

However, it turns out that they may not yet  be able to do everything perfectly. One area where the Amazon product  managers are still struggling is in Europe. Specifically, when it comes  to selling both apparel and footwear they have not yet quite figured out what Europeans really want. 

What can the Amazon product managers do to fix this problem?

If you lived in a modern city, how would you chose to get around town?  

Yes, you could always walk – however, that’s going to take a lot of time  and you are going to be tired when you get where you are going. There  are cabs / Uber / Lyft and these all work, but they can quickly become quite expensive.  Most cities have buses and subways, but how far away from you is the  closest stop and how close is it going to get you to where you want to  go? 

In these modern times in which we are living, it turns out that you  may have another option – ride a bike.

Clearly product managers at the Starbucks coffee chain have no problems getting customers to drop by their stores in the  morning and purchase coffee. 

However, as is the case with product  managers everywhere, the Starbucks product managers are under pressure  to keep growing the firm’s profits. 

If they are going to do this, then  they need to come up with a way to get their morning customers to come back to the stores later in the day and buy more coffee.

When you go shopping, what do you get? 

If you are like most of us you  probably pick up some eggs, some cheese, some vegetables, and, oh yeah,  some milk. However, what type of milk do you get? For a  very long time our choices have been somewhat limited. We always got  the same types: whole, 2%, or skim. However, some creative product  managers are getting ready to change the product development definition  of milk and the existing milk product managers are going to have be be  ready to deal with it. 

What’s going on here?

As product managers, when we want to boost the sales of our product, one  of the  “levers” that we have to make this happen is the price of our  product. 

If everything works out the way that it should, if we lower the  price of our product then sales should go up. However, product managers  who work for traditional retailers are discovering that for them their  product development definition has changed and this lever is not working  the way that it should. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the  fact that their customers are starting to use more technology when they  shop is part of the issue. 

What can be done to put control of a product’s success back in the hands of product managers? 

So here’s an interesting question to kick things off: do you wear a  watch? 

Not all that long ago, the answer to this question would have  been pretty much “yes” for everyone. I mean, how else were you going to  be able to tell what time it was? However, as with all such things in  life, things have changed. Now when people want to know what time it is,  they whip out their mobile phones and glance at them. Kids these days just don’t think about purchasing the fancy watches that their parents used to buy. 

What can watch product managers do to change things? 

I suspect that if I asked you to take a moment and feel sorry for the  product managers who work for Amazon, you probably would not. 

For that  matter, if I asked you to take a moment and feel bad for the product  managers who work for Amazon, you probably would also find that hard to  do. However, it turns out that being one of these types of product managers is quite difficult.  The reason that it is so hard is because although your company is  already very large, you are still under a great deal of pressure to keep  growing your product lines. 

What’s a product manager to do?