Crate and Barrel sells a lot of furniture.  

They are now faced with the age old question of how best to get their  furniture noticed by their potential customers. In the past, the firm  relied on what had always worked for them: still photographs. However,  lately that has all changed. The company now has over a million  Instagram followers. They also now produce more digital content then  they produce photographs. New videos are published on YouTube weekly. 

What changed at Crate and Barrel?

I can’t actually tell you if it would be one of the best product  management jobs to have, but I can tell you that it would certainly be  one of the most delicious. 

What am I talking about? I’m talking about  being a product manager who works for YUM Brands.  You know, the company that owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC  brands. It turns out that the world of fast food that these folks live  in is undergoing a great deal of change and that means that these product managers have to scramble to change their product development definition and keep up. 

As I’m sure that we all know by now, Amazon is a very large company that  does a lot of different things: they ship books and products, offer  cloud computing resources, and even run an internet based television  channel. 

The product managers at Amazon are under an enormous amount of  pressure to always be looking for ways for the company to keep on growing.  This is why they have expanded in to such diverse areas as grocery  stores. However, now the Amazon product managers are taking a closer  look at how they run their business and they’ve decided that it’s time for some of the firms that they have been relying on to go away. 

Now  Amazon is getting ready to update their product development definition  in order to take on UPS and start its own delivery business. 

So for just a moment, picture yourself as a product manager for one of the most iconic products out there: Coke-Cola.  

You’ve done a great job – Coke is one of the most popular drinks  available and no matter what country you go to, it is very well known.  The company makes an enormous amount of money from your soft drink  product every year and in all honesty, traditionally you’ve only had one  real competitor – Pepsi. However, in the past few years, things have started to become a bit more challenging for you.  More and more of your customers are staring to reject the sugary  beverage that you are offering them and instead they are choosing to  drink water and sports drinks. 

What’s a product manager to do? 

So who among us has not heard about the famous TV show “American Idol”?  

This is the show where anyone can try out to be on the show and the  best singers are then selected to compete in a multi-week competition in  which one of them will eventually be crowned the “American Idol” and  potentially get a lucrative recording contract. This show used to be  very popular, then it fell out of popularity and eventually ended up  getting canceled. However, now another network is thinking about  bringing it back. 

Can their product managers change its product development definition and bring a once popular TV show back from the dead? 

 Amazon is a large and powerful company that dominates the world of  online selling. Walmart is a large and powerful company that dominates  the world of bricks & mortar selling. 

These two firms are starting  to come into conflict when it comes to next-day home delivery as Walmart starts to move into online sales and Amazon starts to move into home delivery.  

The product managers at Amazon are going to have to sharpen their  skills and review their product development definition in order to go  into battle with the product managers at Walmart.  

Every product manager job is different. Some are easy and some are hard.  Right now, being the product manager at Boeing who is responsible for the 737 MAX jet would defiantly fall into the difficult category. 

The reason that this would be such a hard job to have right now is because this airplane has experienced a set of disastrous crashes.  In October, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed just minutes after taking off  from Jakarta, Indonesia. It was the first fatal accident involving a 737  Max. 189 people died. This was followed in March when Ethiopian  Airlines Flight 302, involving the same Max jet model, also crashed  minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. 

How can product  manager come back from product setbacks like this?  

So if you were a product manager who was in charge of an automobile,  what do you think that your #1 concern would be? Do you think that your  customers would care most about how fast your car could go? How about  how many doors it has or the size of its tires? Could it be the sound  system or the built-in navigation system? 

What’s very interesting is  that although all of these items may be important to your car buying  customer, they may not be the one thing that will cause them to buy or  not buy your car. What could that one thing be you ask? 

How about cupholders? 

So if you are running a business and you’d like to keep your customers  aware and informed about what products you are offering, what’s the best  way to go about doing this? 

In our modern age, a lot of product  managers would look at their product development definition and say that  you need to update your web site and they’d be correct. 

However, what  more and more store owners are discovering is that one of the oldest retailing tricks has somehow survived the arrival of the e-commerce wave – the paper circular. 

Quick question for you: when was the last time that you were in a Barnes & Noble bookstore?  

When I tried to answer this question, I had to think about it for  awhile. I think that the last time I actually entered one of their  stores was around Christmas when I had whittled my list down to the last  few people who are always hard to shop for. Since then, I haven’t been  back. The Barnes & Noble product managers know that I have not been  back – that’s a problem for them. 

Clearly they need to make some changes in order to get people like me to both visit their stores more often and, of course, buy more stuff!