Service helps uncover product innovation opportunities to address unmet customer needs and create standout experiences that fuel growth

Forrester announced Forrester Decisions for Product Management, a new research service that helps product management leaders and their teams take on an expanding remit to create standout product experiences. According to Forrester, product management leaders in high-performing organizations spend a minimum of 25% of their time understanding customer needs. Forrester Decisions for Product Management offers bold vision research, curated tools and frameworks, and hands-on guidance to enhance product managers’ ability to quickly and more clearly identify unmet customer needs while emphasizing a consistent, collaborative approach to managing products through their lifecycle.

“Today, the success of B2B organizations is increasingly dependent on the quality of their overall customer experience,” said Sharyn Leaver, senior vice president of research at Forrester. “As a result, product management leaders must expand their focus beyond defining required capabilities, creating a product roadmap, and ensuring their products are usable. We believe organizations that expand their view to manage the entire product experience, addressing customers’ unspoken and evolving needs, continuously deliver more value. This service will help product management leaders drive growth through innovation, establish best practices for success, and improve the skills of their team members.”

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The service for product management leaders is part of a portfolio of 15 Forrester Decisions services designed for executives, functional leaders, and their teams — across technology, marketing, CX, sales, and product management — to empower them to move quickly, derisk decisions, and save time and money when tackling their most pressing priorities. The key priorities for product leaders include:

• Discovering customer needs that will drive innovation.
• Managing the product portfolio.
• Implementing value-based pricing.
• Improving the product lifecycle process.
• Enabling agile product management and engineering alignment.
• Clarifying roles, responsibilities, and structure.
• Improving competencies through product manager upskilling.

Additionally, Forrester Decisions offers a personalized digital experience to help users intuitively navigate and share content. Forrester Decisions includes three core components that help leaders make progress on today’s priorities and plan for the future:

1. Bold vision research showcasing the latest insights, trends, predictions, and market forecasts to stay ahead of changing customer and market dynamics. Examples include:

• Forrester’s signature research: Forrester’s take on the important trends that impact business today and what’s coming in the future. This includes research like The Customer-Obsessed Leader, 2021, which explains the five key things customer-obsessed leaders do to guide their teams and organization to customer obsession.
• Customer insights: access to data snapshots that explore business buyer attitudes, behaviors, and technology adoption.
• Technology and service provider landscape evaluations: Learn about emerging vendors in the product management tools and tech market space to evaluate potential partners.

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2. Curated tools and frameworks to tackle priorities with strategic models and plug-and-play templates, including:

• Strategic models: Each Forrester Decisions service contains a core set of strategic models designed to help leaders take immediate action on their most pressing priorities. For example, The Forrester Needs Aperture provides a five-phase process to identify, prioritize, and apply customer needs to drive innovation in the product lifecycle and deliver go-to-market success.
• Peer benchmarks and assessments: Forrester Decisions provides clients with access to operational and performance benchmarks against peers to help them keep pace with the market and  compare their organization’s current state with other high-performing organizations to uncover prioritized areas for improvement.
• Certification courses: With Forrester Decisions, product management leaders can take courses including Leading With Customer Obsession and Building Winning Business Cases to align their teams and understand how to apply frameworks and tools to accelerate their business.

3. Hands-on guidance to apply Forrester research to specific needs:

• Guidance sessions: Leaders can work with Forrester experts to apply frameworks, models, and data to specific contexts.
• Peer discussions: Product management leaders can also engage in collaborative discussions to strategize, validate ideas, and mitigate risks with peers who have similar challenges and aspirations in product management.
• Events: Forrester’s annual events showcase the latest research, share best practices, and offer actionable advice to drive better business results. B2B Summit is the premier event for B2B product management leaders to learn about the latest trends to address current and future customer needs.

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