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Product development is the process of designing, building, operating, and maintaining a good or service. Software and Internet companies use a product development process to ensure that they are not just manufacturing a technology, but creating a product that people will want to buy and continue to use. To be sure, a base technology is at the heart of the product, but product development ensures that the customer’s voice is not lost in the rush to an exciting technology. Product development adds things like pricing, marketing, and customer support to the technology to create a complete product.

Without a product management philosophy and discipline, an IT organization becomes focused on the technology instead of the customers and is often organized along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer. Ultimately, an IT organization must serve its customers or it will go out of business, either because the customers go away or because they complain to executive management until the organization is changed.

Product development is performed by a multi-disciplinary team whose goal is building, operating, and maintaining the product. Team members may include product managers, software developers, project managers, product operations engineers, customer support managers, software quality assurance engineers, user interface design engineers, marketers, financial personnel, and graphic artists.

The product manager serves as the leader of this cross functional team. While the product manager does not necessarily function as the operational manager for these people, she does lead, coordinate, and supervise their work toward the end goal of making the product a reality, launching it, operating it, and managing it throughout its life cycle.

Product management as a discipline is about what the product should be. Product managers are advocates for the customer’s needs and desires. A large product might have numerous product managers working towards its success at a variety of levels, all the way from the junior product manager writing specifications about single feature sets to a product strategy director who has overall responsibility to executive management for the product direction. A product manager’s responsibilities include the following:

Defining and planning product lines and product enhancements
Managing product contracts and sales
Setting strategic direction based on customer needs and business goals
Interpreting strategic goals into operational tasks
Making proposals to senior management regarding implications of proposed plans
Serving as a representative to internal and external clients. Taking the lead in establishing tactical plans and objectives
Developing and implementing administrative and operational matters ensuring achievement of objectives
Evaluating risks and trade-offs
Proposing contingency plans
Analyzing business processes and creating applications to improve or support those processes
Branding
Working with graphic designers to create look and feel
Defining navigational flow and user experience
Defining feature sets and scooping releases

People not familiar with the discipline of product management frequently get a product manager confused with other players.

There are numerous ways to make your marketing budget go further – without compromising on effectiveness or quality. Plan ahead and use the expert help of a reputable mailing house to enable you to achieve the highest return on investment you can for your direct mailing campaign. While some of these top tips are simply common sense others may hopefully provide food for thought…

1. Postage is number one on this list of money saving tips for a good reason; it takes a large chunk out of your direct mailing budget and so needs your urgent attention. In order to cut down on costs enlist the help of experts at a professional mailing house since they will be able to advise you about the many postage discounts offered by Royal Mail and its numerous competitors. For instance, ‘Mailsort 700′ is a postal service which can offer you as much as a 25% postage discount if you are mailing more than 4000 items.

2. Save money on envelopes by becoming informed about the cost implications of the various sizes of envelopes – mailing house tend to buy in bulk, saving them money and they can pass on these discounts to you; and make sure to get advice with regard to which weight of envelope will best suit your mailing requirements.

3. It pays to mail to existing customers: Buying in lists is expensive. If you don’t have the expertise to create your own lists, then arrange for a reputable mailing house to manage your database since they will have the necessary skills and experience to extract the information you need. But – importantly – be very clear about the attributes of your target market and give your direct mailing supplier an in-depth brief.

4. Make sure your mailing lists are ‘clean’ – You do not wish to find out that your mailing has been sent to people no longer at the listed addresses by having it sent back marked ‘Return to Sender ‘(it is estimated that up to a third of addressees move in a two year period) which is expensive and wasteful;by making sure your lists are accurate, with no duplicates, extra postage discounts are available -of up to 27%.

5. When ‘buying in’ lists make sure you are allowed to use the list more than once thereby reducing the mailing costs on repeat mailings. It also makes sense to ‘test’ new lists by mailing to a proportion of it before buying the whole list: See whether you get an adequate response rate – after all, sending mail to millions of individuals you have never contacted before cannot be seen as good practice. Testing the market is often overlooked by direct marketing managers when working to tight budgets, but testing is a crucial aspect of a cost-effective direct marketing campaign.

6. Include more inserts in your mailings – placing additional materials which promote your company’s offerings in with statements and invoices helps cut down on marketing costs -postage rates stay the same up to certain weights. If sending out mailings promoting one particular product or service, it pays to try cross-selling related products – by including extra leaflets your mailing can be more productive with little extra cost.

7. Gather information about all postage costs well in advance of finalising the design of planned mailing pieces. Direct marketing professionals have been known to design and print attractive mailing pieces without checking beforehand how much it will cost to assemble and post them – proving extremely uneconomical at later stages of the campaign. Staff at an experienced mailing house will be able to tell you the costs involved in your proposed mailing before you finalise creative decisions saving you potentially a great deal of money.

8. Measure the effectiveness of all your direct marketing campaigns and work out the cost per response and cost per order – also how much money has a customer spent with you over a given period of time. Those who have spent the most with you recently are likely to be good prospects to buy again.

9. Direct marketing campaigns are prone to setbacks along the way so allow extra time to be planned in so that your mailing house has can complete the job on schedule-marketing materials will need at least a week to print and time needs to be included for delivery to and from the mailing house.; busy mailing houses have to work to tight schedules – if your materials turn up late from the printer there will be cost implications both for the mailing house and for you.

10. A good mailing house will be able to offer you new options as regards printing – the use of a four colour press is no longer a necessary requirement – digital printing can get you good results and is potentially cheaper and faster – especially if mailings are on the small side or for test mailings. The use of digital printing provides you with an increased ability to personalise mailings making targeting your customers easier.