Data-Driven Product Management: A Practitioner-Driven Research Agenda

The global megatrends of digitization and sustainability lead to new challenges for the design and management of technical products in industrial companies. Product management - as the bridge between market and company - has the task to absorb and combine the manifold requirements and make the right product-related decisions. In the process, product management is confronted with heterogeneous information, rapidly changing portfolio components, as well as increasing product, and organizational complexity. Combining and utilizing data from different sources, e.g., product usage data and social media data leads to promising potentials to improve the quality of product-related decisions. In this paper, we reinforce the need for data-driven product management as an interdisciplinary field of action. The state of data-driven product management in practice was analyzed by conducting workshops with six manufacturing companies and hosting a focus group meeting with experts from different industries. We investigate the expectations and derive requirements leading us to open research questions, a vision for data-driven product management, and a research agenda to shape future research efforts.