What Product Manager doesn't want to save time on admin and reporting? In this blog, I explore the benefits of automation in product management. Technology has provided the perfect opportunity for product professionals to use new tools to develop a strategic voice within their business to boost customer value, product growth and innovation. Automation using artificial intelligence and machine learning can significantly reduce time and expenditures on mundane tasks like reporting and admin - empowering Product Managers and Product Owners to establish short and long term plans, implement strategies and create rhythm with their cross-functional team across the business.
As markets evolve, the use of automated product tools will give time back to Product Professionals to set revenue growth targets and value propositions.
In Skyjed, we have automated a cycle of Plan, Review, Act - plus all the reporting you need at each step to ensure product growth and risk mitigation, with the added bonus of virtual team collaboration. Here is a snapshot of what is automated:
- Monitoring and reviewing product growth
- Health-check report to foresee growth opportunities and risks
- Action management
- Sharing of reports
- Creating and managing a virtual team
- Notifications
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Product management activity |
Skyjed automation – product owner assistant. |
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Set product vision and plan |
Set vision and multi-year budgets in growth plan. Budgets include revenue and margin. |
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Review plan |
Review growth plan – across broad product-impacting areas: market, revenue, value, customer, innovation and regulatory. Skyjed guides the PM step-by-step through a review of your product plan. |
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Identify opportunities for improvement and risks |
Skyjed includes innovative Ai generated health-check that are forward looking and present a visual way to see view opportunities and risks. This is done for each product life stage. |
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Monitor and manage |
Use an integrated dashboard to collaborate in real-time with cross-functional team to monitor changes in product health. |
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Adjust priorities |
Automated reporting of product health and insights with real-time dashboards |
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Implement action plans |
Centralised action management across cross-functional virtual team – all auto saved, cloud-based with notifications to relevant owners. |
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Lead cross-functional alignment |
Invite virtual team to collaborate, assign a role and share comments actions and reports |
Without automation, it is a time-intensive task for Product Professionals to gather information to present
Product Managers juggle product-centric information across different teams and platforms. When preparing financial reports it's common to use Excel for analysis, for presentations and updates it's PowerPoint, then perhaps some reports from development team actions in Jira, or sales reports in a CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot, customer satisfaction/NPS survey data across other platforms, and then there's emails – lots of inefficient points for reporting. Lots of admin.
Product managers reported in a global survey that they are spending 50% of their time on ad hoc or reactive reporting. A recent survey from PMF reinforces this, showing that Product Managers indicate they are only have 10% time left for strategy. Automation is a game-changer, and a truly competitive angle.
Automated solutions like Skyjed save up to 25% of Product Manager time - plus with predictive insights gives the ability confidently make data-driven commercial decisions.
The final piece of the automation vs time-management puzzle is enabling Product Managers to deliver on key metrics including revenue/margin. Skyjed's automation allows for efficiently created growth plans and connection across distributed virtual teams within the business to execute on annual product plans and budgets to get the job done.
Have you tried Skyjed? We have a 90-day trial available here - our recommended amount of time to Plan, Review, Act on product strategy.
Hungry for more? Check out our detailed guide on solving product strategy adjustment and virtual team alignment. How to re-evaluate product strategy and forecast the COVID effect as you respond and adapt.