Who doesn’t love a good sandwich? 

When lunch time rolls around (or  perhaps dinner), there is something about grabbing a meal that you can  hold in your hand that can be oh so satisfying. When it comes time for  us to have a sandwich there are a lot of different options for us: we  can make our own or we can go out and buy one. If we decide to go out  and get a sandwich, then where should we go? Restaurants that make sandwiches are pretty easy to set up and so there are a lot of them out there. 

The product managers at one such restaurant, Potbelly’s,  are struggling to come up with ways to change their product development  definition in order to make their sandwich different from all the  others.

Grocery product managers are starting to face a real problem. 

More and more of their business is starting to be driven by customers going online and ordering food and then expecting it to show up at their door.  What this means for these product managers is that the old way of doing  business, building more grocery stores, is no longer going to work in  the future. 

Product managers are going to have to change their product  development definition and find ways to keep up with the changing times.

Being a product manager in a growth industry is one of the best jobs  that any of us can have. 

Everyday things seem to be rushing forward  faster and faster, it’s all that we can do to keep up. This is exactly  how life must be for product managers who are involved in the fracking industry.  Just in case you don’t know, fracking is the process of injecting  liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks, boreholes, etc. so as  to force open existing fissures and extract oil or gas. This technique  has opened up vast new areas of land for drilling for gas and oil. A  product management job in this industry has been one to have for a long  time. 

However, now things are changing and these product managers have a problem on their hands: sand.

Product managers are starting to discover that something that we may have stopped thinking about in this digital age is still very, very  important.

 Even as more and more of our customers are buying things  online, it turns out that they still go out and go shopping. When they  do this, they want to see and touch the things that they are going to be  buying in a store. 

What this means for product managers is that store shelves are still a very important place for our products to be.

The life of a freezer product manager is generally fairly boring. 

Your  product development definition tells you to create more and more  efficient products in order to replace the older units that your  customers are using. You replace the ones that wear out and you are  always looking for new customers. However, with the arrival of the  Covid-19 vaccines that have to be kept very cold, all of a sudden the demand for freezers, and a lot of them, has exploded. 

How are freezer product managers going to deal with their new found popularity?

As product managers we are always being told that we need to better  understand our customers. We believe that if we were to truly understand  them, then we would know how to offer them the products that they want,  when they want them, and where they want them. In the world of retail  products this is especially true. It turns out that there is a special  type of product manager who just may have figured out a new product development definition that allows them to do all of these things at once. Who is this person you ask? Why it’s a pop-up product manager.

One of the things that every product manager would like to have would be a guaranteed customer base.  

We’d all love to know that there was a group of customers out there  that really needed our products and would probably always be buying from  us. It turns out that there are a few markets that are like this. One that comes to mind is your local drugstore.  If a customer needs a prescription filled, they’ll probably be going to  their local drug store to have it taken care of. However, this market  is starting to get competitive and the product managers at the drugstore chain CVS are going to have to do something about that. 

What should they do?

How would you feel about taking on a challenge? Yes you say? Well good –  I’ve got one for you. A very big one. 

The companies that dig minerals  out of the earth have a real problem on their hands. They use a lot of  different vehicles to accomplish their work and currently all of these  vehicles run exactly the same way that the car that you drive to work  does – using a combustion engine. As you can well  imagine, if you are operating in an enclosed underground area, the  exhaust fumes are bad, the impact on the environment is bad, and the  cost of keeping all of those vehicles running is bad. 

These companies  want a better solution and that’s what a group of product managers is  trying to use their product development definition to provide them with.

How would you feel about taking on a challenge? Yes you say? Well good –  I’ve got one for you. A very big one. 

The companies that dig minerals  out of the earth have a real problem on their hands. They use a lot of  different vehicles to accomplish their work and currently all of these  vehicles run exactly the same way that the car that you drive to work  does – using a combustion engine. As you can well  imagine, if you are operating in an enclosed underground area, the  exhaust fumes are bad, the impact on the environment is bad, and the  cost of keeping all of those vehicles running is bad. 

These companies want a better solution and that’s what a group of product managers is  trying to use their product development definition to provide them with.

Oh man! How great would it be to be a product manager at Starbucks? 

I  mean, they are the largest coffee chain going. It sure seems like there  are new Starbucks stores popping up all over the place. In fact,  sometimes when you are going down the road there will be a Starbucks on one side of the road and then you’ll see another Starbucks on the  other side of the road! When you are part of an organization that is  growing so fast, it can be a real challenge to keep things moving. 

The Starbucks product managers have decided to do this by closing some of their existing stores.