Tumbling Tumbleweeds - Clearing Out the Cobwebs

Tumbling Tumbleweeds is a small to medium sized company with a profitable product and stable income.  They are primarily focused on small tweaks and maintenance updates.  Their user base is extremely happy with their product, but is starting to stagnate.  Tumbleweeds knows they need to inject some energy into their product in order to stay competitive.

Bringing in a fresh set of eyes in this situation can be beneficial.  If you existing team has been living and breathing the product for too long, they've become blind to opportunities and pitfalls.  It can take an outside perspective to see what may be obvious to others.

Here are some areas a PM can help in this situation:

• Product Evaluation - Are there features of your product that are not being used?  Are there highly used features of your competitor's products that you are missing?  Are you not reaching a business goal due to missing features?  
• User Feedback - Do your users love the functionality, but hate that the button is green?  Are there "accepted workarounds" that just don't need to be there?  Collecting fresh user feedback through user testing is a great opportunity to remove any assumptions.
• Product Roadmap - Where are the opportunities and what are the right features?  How are those features defined? How are those features sequenced?  What is the appropriate cadence?  How will you communicate updates?  Is everyone on the same page?  Regular updates with a clearly defined value will engage and retain users.
• Resource Evaluation - Is the company appropriately staffed to support the product's evolution?  Are you missing skills such as social media marketing, interactive prototyping, or business intelligence?  You may need to look to bring on new skills to progress your product goals.

Dusting off the product does not have to mean drastic changes with little value.  Small, incremental changes with a clear value to your users can keep things moving forward.  This may mean bringing in someone to clear out the cobwebs and pull out the treasures you've long forgotten.