Product Management

Product managers are responsible for the success of their products.  Their goal is to ensure the products function properly and meet their customers' needs.  More importantly, product managers need to know how their customers use their product so improvements can be made, customers retained, and product success is maintained.  While we can't help you achieve all these goals, following are those where PreEmptive can make a substantial impact:

1) Understand Utilization

Few software publishers have more than a cursory view into how their clients actually use their applications.  As a result, they rely on anecdotal information and general user feedback to guide them in the improvement/development process.  Actual use is often substantially different than perceived use, making this approach tenuous at best, and possibly dangerous.  PreEmptive's instrumentation platform (Dotfuscator) and Runtime Intelligence Services (RIS) provide the foundation necessary to have a full customer experience improvement program.  It enables publishers to track feature usage, application flows, and more to better understand what provides value and to focus the organization's future enhancements.

2) Prioritize Development

Leveraging the information derived above combined with user/client input, publishers can architect much stronger roadmaps and satisfy sale's demands for products that compete effectively in the marketplace.  Those features that influence buying behavior (see Software Sales & Marketing Responsibilities) can now be matched with the roadmap and more effectively align investment with revenue drivers.  Several PreEmptive solutions directly address this need, including Beta, Focus Group, Customer Experience, and Product Improvement solutions.

3) Test & Refine New Releases

PreEmptive's Beta Intelligence Solution is designed specifically to allow product management professionals with a platform to track the performance of beta releases of their software applications.  In addition to tracking performance metrics, gathering information about operating systems, and other performance characteristics of the PCs upon which the apps are run, the solution provides key data about new feature utilization.  The result is more complete and accurate testing by clients of new features in their own environments.  If tied to PreEmptive's integrated Microsoft Licensing Solution, this also provides key exposure of power users to new features that may represent account expansion opportunities.

4) Promote Key Features & Functions

With full visibility into how a publisher's applications are being used and what influences actual buying behavior, Product Management professionals can better highlight key application capabilities and train their organizations in how to best utilize this new information.  When our Evaluation Solution is integrated with CRM, the publisher can choose to align actual users of key features as references in the sales cycle.  The same information can be used in product marketing efforts and provide interesting fodder for user group meetings or online forums.