What is Service Product Management and how different is it from Product Management?

Service Product Management is concerned with the management of a service product over its entire life cycle. This organizational role is found in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer organizations.

Unlike hardware or software, a service product is intangible and might take the form of pure professional services or a combination of services and necessary software and/or hardware. The technique of service product management ensures that a lucrative service is managed in the marketplace. The role of the Service Product Manager is to identify profitable service areas, package services in a productized manner, and distribute them to the market. Service managers also frequently deal in intangibles and notional values of services.

As you can see here, service product management is very similar to product management with almost identical lifecycle management. But there is a small difference, in contrast to physical product launches and distribution, which, along with sales and marketing, compose the product lifecycle, service product managers manage relationships both inside and externally, including aspects like finance, legal and administrative functions.

As the Indian service sector is growing rapidly, the job prospects are also growing for Service Product Management.