What is Product Management?

Product Management is growing exponentially and there is a huge demand for Product Managers. But what exactly is Product Management, that’s what I am going to explain in this post.

Let’s understand Product Management by breaking Product and Management individually.

What is Product?

A?Product?is the vehicle through which businesses deliver values to its customers, now this vehicle can exist in physical or in digital form, or it can be a goods or a service. In both the cases,?it must deliver a value. For example, a shoe especially designed for sprinters made by an athlete shoe company. The shoe is light weight, comfortable, size can be customized as per the sprinter foot size and with good build quality. Now this shoe company is delivering value (such as perfectly fitted shoe, light weight and durable) to the sprinters via the product i.e., the shoe. Likewise for digital form, example we have lots of ticket booking app (for movies, flights, buses and others) which provides values such as, customers can book tickets while on the go and customer can be assure that they are getting the best price available in the market.

If there is no value, there is no product.?The product must possess the values and the values must be align with what the customer’s needs is. We will talk about customer needs and wants, problems and solutions in later blogs. For now, let just digest it, a product must have a value to deliver.

What is Management?

Now let’s understand what?Management?means, Management means directing and leading a group of people or an organization to reach a common goal. The common goal here can be, achieving the vision of the organization or it can be increasing the revenue by certain percent, or it can be to acquire certain number of customers, or it can be creating a vehicle (product) to deliver the values to customers.

So altogether?Product Management?means driving a group of people to create the vehicle (Product) through which the business can deliver values to its customers. Product Management as a process start with the initial idea of the product or a feature and continues till the end-life of it.

Product Management is the intersection between Design, Technology and Business. It validates whether the feature or the product (as a whole), is viable, useable, valuable and feasible. If the feature or the product fails in any of these parameters, it needs to be dropped from the plan immediately.

Who is a Product Manager?

Product Manager?identifies the customer and the business needs that a product or a feature will fulfil. They facilitate the process of Product Management on a day-to-day basis. Product Managers owns the product and drives the Product Team toward the vision of the product.

What are the Roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager?

1. Defines the Vision of the Product
2. Creates Strategies to achieve the Vision
3. Creates Roadmaps (Roadmaps is a tool to explain what is being delivered and by when?
4. Constantly be in touch with the customers to understand their needs and act as customer’s voice
5. Works closely with the Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support to ensure business goals and customer needs are met.
6. Prioritises what needs to be build
7. Keeps a close eye on the market trends, customer behavior and competitions

What Skills are required to be a Product Manager?

1. Communication:?The most important skill a product manager should have, is communication skill. Product Managers constantly communicate with Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support Teams and other stakeholders, so it is foremost important that he/she can convey the message in a very clear and comprehensive way.
2. Product Sense:?It is the ability to understand why a product or a feature would work or wouldn’t work. Product sense is the combination of 3 qualities; 1. Cognitive Empathy, 2. Creativity and 3. Domain Knowledge.
3. Analytical Skills:?It is the ability to analyse data to provide actionable insights.
4. Design:?Product Manager don’t have to design the UI but the understanding of the design process and the ability to differentiate between a bad design and a good design will help in making decision as well as help communicating with the designer in their own languages.
5. Understanding of Technology:?It doesn’t mean that he/she have to code but the high-level understanding of technology will help in making decisions as well as help in communicating with the engineers in their own languages.
6. Ability to conduct research systematically:?There are different kind of research a Product Manager does, such as customer research, market research, experimentation etc. The ability to conduct research in a systematically way will help the product manager saves a lot of time.

Hope this brings in the clarity as to What is Product Management. I am going to post some more article soon about Product Vision, Strategy and other important topics on Product Management as well as on Product Design, so stay tune.

Please Note: The roles, responsibilities and the skillsets listed above are not the comprehensive but are the most important ones.