CIOL: What role do you see for technology in collaborating product planning and product marketing?
RV: Technology has made a marked shift in the way marketing information is collected. It has moved away from customer sampling based techniques to data mining techniques by increasing the vastness and preciseness of customer data captured. Technology trends like Web 2.0 enable self-adaptable marketing techniques by enhanced feedback mechanisms and focused interactions. And this works both ways as in disbursing product marketing info too.

CIOL: What are the factors that act as deterrents while defining the product management roles and responsibilities?
RV: Product Management activities cover a broad spectrum of things and are sure to overlap with some of the other defined responsibilities. A product manager is involved in opportunity assessment, drafting of product requirements, project management (engineering, support), marketing activities and the list can go on. Then there are overlapping products themselves, product managers working in close contours. As a result, product management responsibilities are evolved more often than they are defined. Therefore some ambiguity in role definitions is unavoidable.
Another factor is rapidly changing market conditions that requires management of different stages of product life cycle at the same time as organizations position their products in different market segments. This also requires the product manager to wear different hats.

CIOL: For whom do you think the product management is the most critical, producer or consumer?
RV: Customers spend huge amounts on enterprise products, integrating them, customizing them. There are issues about compatibility & upgrades. Product companies have to keep innovating in order to stay ahead. Product management can be a triaging hub for product companies as well as the customers.

CIOL: Do you think the approaches for product enhancement and new product should be different? If yes, what should be the differentiator?
RV: Product enhancement strengthens the existing products' portfolio. It helps in locking in customers, application upgrades are notorious for that, and acquire new customers for the product category. New product development involves differentiated requirements and captures a new segment. The differentiator between them is the 'fit' factor; product enhancement is concerned with how the enhancement features fit with the existing overall application of the product. New product development warrants the requirements to be differentiated enough and to substantiate a new product.

CIOL: What is the main driver for product management, cost or quality?
RV: Products require investment in development; deployment and marketing while the returns are spread over purchases and implementations. Returns depend on differentiation and the product demand. In a differentiated market with high product complexity (enterprise level software e.g. Stratify Legal Discovery ) it's the quality, the technology and the feature enrichment which is at play. Quality and cost are intertwined. Companies invest in quality; they buy quality products which increase the notional costs but quality reduces the total cost of ownership in form of increased service levels, better productivity and less lost opportunities.