One of the most hotly contested markets right now is the home delivery of food.  

In just about every major city, you can see multiple options for  getting food delivered to you when you enter any restaurant. However,  for those potential customers who live in smaller towns and cities, home  delivery of food has not been an option – until now. Product managers  are starting to view the smaller towns as the next battlefield now that they are already entrenched in the big cities. 

How will they change their product development definition in order to capture these  new customers?

Every product manager wants to be in charge of a product that customers want. 

However, it turns out that some of us have to deal with situations  in which our customers want what we have, but they are also afraid to  give us what we need in order to deliver our product to them. A great  example of this happening in the health care market. 

Customers are very  aware of the data privacy issues and so they are hesitant to use the  health care products that the product managers are providing them with.

The world that we live in is changing and what this means for product managers is that we need to find ways to change with it. 

One area that  is undergoing dramatic changes is how we go about fixing dinner.  It used to be that you and I would either eat out or we’d go to the  grocery store, pick up some ingredients, and then come home and make a  meal. However, that has all changed now.  The arrival of companies that make meal kits have created a system where we now get the ingredients that we need to  make dinner delivered to our house and then we just have to spend a few  minutes whipping up a delicious meal. 

The challenge for the product managers at these meal kit companies is how to stay in business.

If there is one new product that is currently red hot, it would be food  delivery. 

There are a bunch of brand new companies that seem to have  shown up overnight who are now all vying to deliver food to our houses.  Not wanting to get left behind in this booming market, Amazon has  decided to roll out their own food delivery service. Amazon does so many  different things so well that you would assume that this new service  would be an instant hit. However, that is turning out to not be the  case. 

What are the Amazon product managers doing wrong?

If there is one job that most product managers would not want to have these days, it would to be a product manager for an independent book store.  

I mean really, Amazon showed up several decades ago and pretty much put  these guys out of business. Customers have become used to browsing for  books on their computer and then pressing a button and either having a  book show up in the mail the next day or having a Kindle electronic book instantly downloaded. Who needs to go out to a book store anymore?  

However, independent bookstores are still in business and it’s because  of what their product managers have done that they are still around.

One of the fasting growing areas in retail right now has to do with the home delivery of food.  

Just about everywhere that you go to eat, you probably see stickers  plastered on the window saying that if you wanted to stay home and eat  this location’s food, you could do it by calling one of several  different home food delivery firms. What a wonderful age we are living  in! However, it turns out that for the product managers who work at  these food delivery firms, all is not so good. 

They have a real  challenge on their hands and they need to find out how to make their new  business be financially successful.

Pity the poor product managers at McDonalds! 

They work for one of the  most successful fast food restaurants on the planet and so they are  charged with finding ways to make their business grow bigger and grow  faster all the time. McDonalds is already a fairly smooth flowing  operation that has years of experience in what works well. However, the  competitive fast food market in which they are competing is changing and  this means that McDonalds has to make changes to their product development definition and get better at what they are doing. 

What changes will their product managers make?

As product managers, one of the most important things that we do is to use our product development definition to create products that our customers are going to want.  

There are lot of different ways that we can go about doing this. We can  place them in attractive packages, we can get celebrities to endorse  them, and in the case of food products, we can make them taste good.  This is why it is so strange that some product managers are currently  working very hard to get people to try a new type of wellness shot that generally tastes very bad. 

How is this going to look on anyone’s product manager resume?

The product managers at Facebook have real problem on their hands. 

The  company is so large and so successful, that in order to make it larger  and more successful they have to come up with really big ideas.  This means that they have to sit around and review their product  development definition as they try to identify new products that can  appeal to their over 2 billion users. 

The Facebook product managers  think that they’ve come up with something that is going to work: a new  cryptocurrency called Libra.

When you are thirsty, what kind of drink do you reach for? 

A lot of us  will grab a soda, a water, or maybe even a coffee or a tea. However,  just a few years ago a new option showed up: favored bubbly water. The  leader in this market category was a brand called LaCroix.  The LaCroix product managers did very well for a long time. However,  the popularity of their product has attracted new competitors and now  the LaCroix product managers have to take a look at their product development definition and find ways to defend their market share. 

What should they do to keep the fizz in their product sales?