Product Management

Dr. Anil Sahai,
University of California, Santa Cruz
20-Oct-2009

Dr. Anil Sahai is an adjunct faculty in the department of Technology and Information Management at University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching taught courses in the areas new product development, services business management and IT strategy. He has a PhD. in Computer Science University of California, M.S. in Computer Science from University of Pittsburgh, M.S.in Mathematics/OR from Ohio University, and B.A. (Honors) in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, India.
Dr. Anil Sahai’s interaction with the students focused on Innovative Designs in Products and how to create a product to meet the consumer’s needs.

The major challenge in developing a successful product is to figure out the customer needs. Most often there is a mismatch between what the customer defines as his need and what the development team understands it to be. The challenge lies in bridging this information gap. He also said that a company should design the product but don’t think a miracle will happen in order to capture the market. It needs to be followed by strong marketing strategy to achieve the desired effect.

Dr. Sahai touched upon the stages in developing a product from Idea Generation, Screening, Concept Development, Business Analysis, Budgeting, Product Testing, Technical Implementation and finally Commercialization.

According to Dr. Sahai three features needed for a product are Pain, Cost and Solution, where every product or service is the result of a Pain endured by the customer and the cost of mitigating that Pain determines the pricing strategy for the product

Towards the end of the session he briefly dwelled upon the reasons for projects tend to fail. The main reason is lack of adequate budget followed by inefficient team, failure in development and product launch plan. He also mentioned about the reasons for the failure of a new product including product design issues, cost of product development, competitive actions and over estimation of the market size.

"Understanding the customer, market and competition is important to develop a product with superior value".