Towards a Data-Driven Product Management – Concepts, Advantages, and Future Research

Megatrends, such as digitization or sustainability, are confronting the product management of manufacturing companies with a variety of challenges regarding the design of future products, but also the management of the actual products. To successfully position their products in the market, product managers need to gather and analyze comprehensive information about customers, developments in the products’ environment, product usage, and more. The digitization of all aspects of life is making data on these topics increasingly available – via social media, documents, or the internet of things from the products themselves. The systematic collection and analysis of these data enable the exploitation of new potentials for the adaption of existing products and the creation of the products of tomorrow. However, there are still no insights into the main concepts and cause-effect relationships in exploiting data-driven approaches for product management. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the main concepts and advantages of data-driven product management. To answer the corresponding research questions a comprehensive systematic literature review is conducted. From its results, a detailed description of the main concepts of data-driven product management is derived. Furthermore, a taxonomy for the advantages of data-driven product management is presented. The main concepts and the taxonomy allow for a deeper understanding of the topic while highlighting necessary future actions and research needs.