Ok, so I’m willing to make a confession here. 

I get a little thrill each and every time I come to the front door and see an Amazon box sitting there waiting for me to bring it into the house and open it up. It’s almost  like Christmas day all over again! However, the product managers at  Amazon have come to a realization that they need to find a way to save money. What they want to do is to find ways to ship things to their customers in fewer and smaller containers. 

Are they going to be able to do this?

When it comes time for you to get some groceries, what do you do? 

If you  are like most of us, you jump into your car. Drive to the grocery  store. Shop for what you want and buy it. Then you jump into your car  again and drive home. It turns out that this is a really inefficient way  of going about doing things and the product managers at grocery stores want to make some changes. 

However, in order to make those changes they are first going to have to update their product development definition and invent some grocery delivery robots.

In this wonderful modern age in which we are all living, just about anything can be purchased online. 

However, there is a downside to this. You can’t touch online products. You can’t hold them in your hands and feel them. You can’t try them on.  What’s missing from this whole online shopping experience is the  ability to get close to the items that we are thinking about buying.  Perhaps this is where the department store product managers could come in. 

Do they hold the secret to getting online products into real customer’s hands?

The product managers at Amazon have a bit of a problem on their hands  right now. 

They have a popular voice activated device called Alexa that can play music, look up things on the web, add things to a  shopping list and a lot of other things all using voice commands – no  typing, no screen swiping. However, Alexa exists in a very competitive  market. Google and Apple both have competing products. This means that  the Amazon product managers have to do something to make their product  unique. 

They think that they may have come up with a great idea: health care data.

Anyone who went to university knows all about Domino’s.  

After a late night of studying, they were the ones that we’d all call  to have a hot and tasty pizza delivered to us. What a lot of us may not  know is that it was Domino’s that first made pizza popular in the U.S.  back in the 1960’s. The pizza market is in the midst of undergoing a high tech transformation and its product managers are going to have to get ready to deal with a brave new world. 

What kind of changes to their product development definition are they going to be facing and how will they deal with them?

I’m pretty sure that by now we all know who Amazon is. 

They are the very  large company that started out as a book seller and over time has  morphed into a company that sells just about everything and seems to do  just about everything. The Amazon product managers seem to have an  almost golden touch when it comes to their product development  definition – everything that they lay their hands on seems to be very  successful. They have started offering the world’s most successful cloud  service, they bought Whole Foods, and they have just launched one-day  deliveries. However, it turns out that not everything that they do is successful. 

A good example of this is their restaurant delivery business.

As just about everyone knows, you can order anything from Amazon. 

However, where a lot of us get a bit confused is just exactly how what we order actually gets to our doorstep.  Yeah, yeah – for many of us Prime members we know that it will arrive  in two days (or less), but just exactly how does it get there? 

It turns  out that the answer to that question has been bothering the Amazon  product managers also and so they’ve taken a look at their product  development definition and come up with an answer to this issue: Amazon is rolling out their own home delivery service.

So if you want to go to a concert, a monster truck show, or a circus,  who do you buy your tickets from? 

If you are like most of us you would go online, go to a website run by Ticketmaster, and purchase your tickets.  This is the way that we’ve always done it. Now things are getting ready  to change. 

The product managers at Ticketmaster are getting ready to  face the first serious competition that they have had in decades. What  makes this an even bigger deal is that the competition is being run by  their ex-CEO!

Let’s face it: pandemics suck. 

Your best laid plans for how you were  going to boost the success of your product at the beginning of the year  got turned on their heads. As a product manager, you still have the same  goals, it’s just that the rules of the game seem to have been changed. What you are going to need is some way to try to understand this new world that we all find ourselves living in. You need more information. 

Perhaps getting more data might be just exactly what you need to make it through this pandemic?

Grocery product managers have gone a long time without having to make  any big changes. 

However, in the past few years their job has become  more and more challenging. The arrival of online shopping was in the  process of fundamentally changing how their business was run.  However, just to make things even more complex, the Covid-19 pandemic  has changed how people shop for food. 

This means that grocery product  managers now have to make even more changes to their product development definition, and they have to make them fast!