Product management is an organizational function within a company dealing with new product development, business justification, planning, verification, forecasting, pricing, product launch, and marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Similarly, product lifecycle management (PLM) integrates people, data, processes and business systems. It provides product information for companies and their extended supply chain enterprise.
Estimating and Forecasting is the process of making predictions of the future based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends. It involves predicting some variable of interest at some specified future date, may refer to formal statistical methods or to less formal judgmental methods. Risk and uncertainty are central to estimating and forecasting, where one of the variables is the degree of uncertainty while another is the validity of the data that is being predicted on.