So if I was to take a look inside of your purse or wallet right now,  what would I find? I’m willing to bet that you probably have either a  Visa or a Mastercard credit card, perhaps an American Express credit  card or even a Discover credit card. However, what else would be there? 

Would you have any store issued credit cards?  Perhaps from Walmart, Macy’s, Home Depot, etc.? 

Well guess what, these  store issued credit cards are in trouble and their product managers are  scrambling to find ways to change their product development definition  in order to save them. 

Shaving is something that men without beards or mustaches do just about  every day. 

In all honesty, I don’t think that we spend a lot of time  thinking about shaving – it’ just something that we do. 

Over at Gillette, since they make razors, they spend a lot of time thinking about how men shave and they have reached a startling conclusion: their products cost too much! 

Let’s face it: if you are a product manager for the traditional car engine, called an internal combustion engine, things are looking rather tough for you right now. 

The world is changing and you’ve suddenly got a lot of completion.  The arrival of popular electric vehicles and a bunch of new government  regulations about pollution mean that internal combustion engines are  now at risk and their product development definition is going to have to  be changed. 

The good news for product managers is that the auto makers  and oil companies are coming together to find ways to save this type of  engine. The secret appears to be a new high-tech engine oil. 

So let’s talk about email for just a moment.  If you are like me, you get a ton of the stuff. In all honesty, most of  it is junk and I just end up deleting it even before I read it.  

However, there are those one or two emails that just happen to catch my eye.  I’m in the market for something and that email seems to be talking  about what I know that I’m looking for. When this happens, and it  doesn’t happen very often, I will open and, gasp!, read the email. 

It  turns out that retail product managers are currently not doing a very  good job of getting me to open the emails that they send me. What’s up? 

When was the last time that you went out to a mall? 

For most of us, it’s  probably been a while. We used to always go to the mall – that’s where  you could get stuff, especially during the holidays. However, with the  arrival of online shopping most of us don’t go to malls  as much anymore. This has created a problem for mall product managers.  

Creating and filling a mall with stores used to be a straightforward job  for product managers: get a few big stores, get some smaller but still  well known stores, and ta-da you had a mall. 

However, with today’s changing retail situation, mall product managers are having to change their product development definition and how they do their job. 

Product managers for grocery stores have actually had it pretty easy for  quite some time. If you think about it, your local grocery store  probably has not changed all that much since you were a little kid. Oh  sure, now they have organic vegetables and perhaps they create prepared  meals, but their product development definition has not really changed  all that much. 

It turns out that big changes are getting ready to come. With the arrival of “shop from home services”, grocery stores are going to have to change in order to stay in business. 

It sure seems like their product managers are going to have to start to get innovative. 

How many of you have ever been involved in a water balloon fight? I’m  willing to bet that most of us have at some point in time. 

Do you  remember how that went? You got some balloons, then it seemed to take  forever as you used the hose to fill the balloons, and then you  proceeded to run around your yard throwing your balloons at your friends  trying to get them as wet as you possibly could. I think that we can  all agree that the biggest delay in our fun was the annoying time that it took to fill up all of those water balloons.  

Well good news, that problem has been solved. However, soon after it  was solved someone else came along with the same solution. 

What’s a  product manager to do? 

So here’s a quick question for you: what is the shortest time that  you’ve ever worked at a product manager job? 

Product managers are  generally considered to be valuable members of the product team who work  on the product development definition and we can have a direct impact  on the bottom line of the product project that we are involved in. We’re  valuable and generally a company would be resistant to getting rid of  us as long as our product is doing well. 

That’s why I was surprised when I got fired after two weeks on the job at my new product manager position. 

As product managers, the one thing that we’d all like to have is more customers.  We dream of the day that we’ve created a product development definition  that will cause our customers think about our product and then as  quickly as they can take action to get their hands on it. 

These hopes  and dreams are no different for product managers who work in the  restaurant industry. These product managers have the same set of things that they want. A little while back they thought that they had found a  way to make it happen: create mobile applications to support their restaurant! 

Well, good idea, but it came with some side effects that nobody had counted on… 

Let’s be straight about a few things: the world in which we live is  currently changing. A lot. Nowhere is this more evident than perhaps  when we take a look at how consumers go about buying food.  

This used to be a simple task: people jumped into their cars with their  food shopping list in hand and drove to the local grocery store and got  what they needed. However, with the arrival of that internet thing,  this is all starting to change. 

People are now starting to shop for food  online. What this has meant for food company product managers is that  their world is changing. Case in point. People who are shopping online  tend to just buy exactly what is on their shopping list. Nothing else.  

This means that product managers have to come up with ways to change  their product development definition so that they can convince them to  add last minute items that they may not have been planning on buying.  How are they going to do that?