Product management is neither R&D nor sales, but the intersection of making it and selling it
Sam Knox
In any well-managed for-profit organization, you can slot any one contributor into the “making it” or the “selling it” category, and occasionally, both categories. In larger organizations, there are roles outside the making and selling functions, for example, a financial controller might be involved only in managing money, but mostly, a contributor can be tied to one function or the other.
Why am I pointing this out? Well, I have spoken mostly about making a product. That is, only the first half of the equation.
Selling your product is easily as big a job as making it. It might cost a lot more to sell it than to make it. In fact, the easier the product is to make, the more it will cost to sell it compared with how much it will cost to make it. For example, if you are selling those waxed paper cups to Starbucks and other café retailers, the cost of manufacturing it might be a fraction of your cost of sales. Anyone can get into the business of making and selling waxed coffee cups, which pushes the challenge into the selling of it. Conversely, a drug that reduces the metastasizing of cancer is enormously complex, and thus, the challenge is more in the making of it. Sure, millions of dollars will be spent on marketing and selling the drug, but that pales in comparison to how much was spent developing the drug in the first place.
Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $77,800
No comments:
Post a Comment