Transitioning from Designer to Product Manager

“Optimism requires confidence, and confidence is built on trust.”  ― Tim Brown, IDEO

Product management is an organisational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or 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. (wikipedia)

Framework / Product Management

Product management is a strategic organisational role. Product managers typically found at companies that are building products or technology for the customer or internal use. This role evolved from the brand manager position that often found at consumer goods companies. The product manager is often considered the CEO of their product and is responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for that product or product line. The position may also include marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss responsibilities.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” –Henry Ford

Martin Eriksson, cites that product manager role as it changes throughout the life cycle of the product, it's no more defining the vision of the product but to understand the product market and target customers and then to work with the product team to add a dose of creativity to make the product more alluring. It’s then about evangelising the product vision and inspiring those making the product with that passion. 

Product Life-Cycle Stages

Successful product manager requires a diverse set of social, commercial and technical skills and above all these else the ability to empathise and communicate with many different groups of stakeholders on their terms. Look closer into the Venn diagram into each circle.

-  Business : Product Management is above all else a business function, focused on maximising business value from a product. Product Managers should be obsessed with optimising a product to achieve the business goals while maximising return on investment. 

-  User Experience : Last but not least the Product Manager is the voice of the user inside the business and must be passionate about the user experience. Again this doesn’t mean being a pixel pusher, but you do need to be out there testing the product, talking to users and getting that feedback first hand – especially in a start-up.

-  Technology : There’s no point defining what to build if you don’t know how it will get built. Doesn't mean a Product Manager needs to be able to sit down and code but understanding the technology stack and most importantly understanding the level of effort involved is crucial to making the right decisions. Even more important in an Agile world where Product Managers spend more time day to day with the development team than with anyone else inside the business.

A great product manager has the brain of an engineer , the heart of a designer and the speech of a diplomat . -  Deep Nishar

Design is more…

As the UX Design discipline has matured in the last few years, business people have started appreciating the value of design thinking brings. This is created a growing trend of UX Designers taking on more business responsibility and moving into Product Management Roles.

The designer is someone that makes solution look presentable, desirable, viable, feasible. Designers are there to help identify, investigate, and validate the problem, and ultimately craft, design, test and ship the solution. 

Designers have a great background to move into product management. If you feel like you don’t have the level of product influence you want, or if you feel like your analytical skills are being underutilised, then you might do well as a PM. Designers already are familiar with focusing on the customer and designing great products. Some companies have PMs do a lot of the interaction design, so those skills will still get a lot of use.

“Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.” –Dave McClure

Practice Prioritization

One of the biggest changes in moving from design to product management is becoming responsible for prioritisation. As a Product Manager (PM), you’ll be responsible for shipping the product, which means avoiding feature creep and scoping the implementation as you get more information from engineering on the costs.

Sometimes you need to do things the quick and dirty way, and sometimes you need to cut a feature that would have made the product a lot more usable. As a designer, you can practice by prioritising the pieces of your designs and discussing them with your PM. See if you’d make the same calls, and if not, try to understand what underlies the differences. Pay attention to what gets de-prioritized, either explicitly or implicitly, because the team runs out of time.

An excellent way to hone your prioritisation sense is to follow up on your designs after they’ve launched. See if you can talk to customers or read support tickets to learn if your prioritisation was right. Are people complaining about a missing feature you wanted to cut? Or are they raving about something you fought to built-in? Most people discover that they can cut a lot more than they thought.”

“The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic ‘right-brain’ thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.” –Daniel Pink

Source:

Martin Eriksson www.mindtheproduct.com

Gayle McDowell and Jackie Bavaro Book /Cracking the PM Interview :How to land a Product Manager Job in Technology

Tim Brown CEO - IDEO / Design Thinking

Jock Busuttil Book/ The Practitioner's Guide to Product Management

Pinkesh Shah Director Programs, Institute of Product Leadership,

Rahul Abhyankar Product Management Executive, San Francisco Bay Area

Deep Nishar Product Strategist. Mountain View, California