These are great questions! Let’s back up a bit, though, before I reply.
What is a ‘product’? Our answer is simple. A product is any combination of hardware, software or services that solves a known problem. While many in the industry (including our own clients) consider ‘product’ to equal ‘software’ and ‘services’ to mean something else, Pragmatic Marketing doesn’t look at is that way.

Think of it this way. You find an unsolved problem in your market segment. Perhaps that problem is best solved with a professional service initially, until you learn a bit more about real-life implementations. Your ‘product’ could be time and materials access to people, templates and toolkits developed in something like MS-Word or MS-Excel. Once you executed this service a time or twenty, you may discover that there are repeatable bits within each implementation that could be embodied in software. This software could be used by your own staff, or maybe licensed by the customer. Ultimately you may seek to embed this software as firmware in a device that customers use. Get the idea?

So, if a product can be any combination of hardware, software or services, then the answer to the first part of your question is a resounding “Yes”! Consulting services and training are absolutely products.

The next part of your question you may have already answered yourself. If consulting services and training are products, then the role for product management is the same: messenger of the market. Our job as product managers in consulting and training companies is to be outside the building interacting with ‘real people in their native habitat’. Our goal for these interactions is to uncover unsolved problems. Once we discover them, we validate if they are pervasive, urgent and our markets are willing to pay to have them solved. Next step: business case, development, go-to-market – make sense?

The role of product management is to be the ‘president of the product’, guiding an organization to make smart investments into solutions that people want to buy. Focus on knowing your market better than they know themselves, and it makes no difference what you sell!

Answered by Jim Foxworthy