The words product management and product manager get thrown around quite a lot these days among professionals, irrespective of their industry. But yet, many are still unclear on what exactly they mean.
Any business planning to develop a new product and sell it needs a strategy to manage every aspect and step of the entire process. This area is where product management comes in. It is vital to any organization that runs a business.
This article explains all about product management and the roles and responsibilities of product managers.
Table of Contents
What is product management?
Product management is an organizational function that manages every step of the product’s lifecycle. It includes product planning, development, pricing, product launch, marketing, and support to the end-users.
Even though product management focuses on improving the product and its consumers, it significantly impacts its stakeholders because it integrates the people, teams, departments, data, resources, processes, systems, and other elements in an organization.
History
The term and concept of product management might have been gaining much traction in recent years, but it was born in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, Neil H McElroy, a marketing manager at Proctor & Gamble, proposed the idea of “brand man.” A “brand man” was a separate employee to manage a specific product instead of a traditional managerial role. He wrote a 300-page memo to explain it!
In the late 1930s, McElroy, now an advisor at Stanford University, introduced this concept to two young people: Bill Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of HP (Hewlett-Packard). They implemented “brand man” at HP for about 50 years, from 1943 to 1993.
Around the same time, Toyota also implemented this idea by developing the JIT (Just In Time) and Kanban principles. Slowly, emerging processes replaced outdated methods to create a unified product management role.
Product Management vs. Project Management
Product management often gets confused with project management. Because companies often employ both product managers and project managers. Their roles often overlap. Also, both have the same acronym, PM.
Product management involves:
- Research.
- Setting product visions and goals.
- Prioritize the product backlog.
- Communicating the same with stakeholders.
- Strategic planning and development of the product.
- Maintaining the product roadmap.
Project management involves:
- Overseeing the approved plans.
- Managing the resources, scheduling, and monitoring tasks.
- Budget management.
- Progress communication with stakeholders.
However, both product managers and project managers do have some similarities. They interact with different teams and departments within the organization and the stakeholders.
Why is product management critical?
The term “product” in product management is not limited to products but services offered by a company. Because a service also requires a proper roadmap, planning and developing the offerings, and understanding customer requirements. Thus, product management is needed irrespective of whether the company sells products, services, or both.
There are many other reasons why product management is essential:
- The main goal of any product or service is to meet the customers’ requirements. Product management helps understand their pains, problems, challenges and design the right product.
- Technology continuously evolves, and software becomes obsolete. Product management helps to plan and have a clear roadmap that allows the product to stay relevant for a longer duration.
- Often good products fail due to ineffective marketing. PMs conduct extensive market research and competition analysis to develop insights and devise competent marketing strategies.
- When cross-functional teams work together, it becomes difficult to collaborate appropriately. PMs effectively communicate with different groups as well as the stakeholders.
- As PMs understand the product’s technical aspects, planning practically, allocating resources, prioritizing, and solving problems becomes easy. On the other hand, lack of technical understanding often poses many challenges in the traditional management system.
- PMs take feedback from the clients and customers and use the information to roll out new versions and build better products. Also, product management creates timely and effective customer support and product maintenance.
What do product managers do?
A product manager leads the product through all stages of its life cycle like planning, development, shipment, marketing, and support. The role is also called the CEO of the product.
The day-to-day activities involve various tasks and vary with the company and the product. The role requires an intersection of business, technology, and design, and it’s the product manager’s responsibility to balance the work across all three.
On the outside, the work may seem like attending many meetings, but product managers do a lot more than that. Their responsibilities include:
- The product manager sets the product strategy, vision, and roadmap. It also requires understanding customers’ requirements and setting product goals aligned with its strategic objectives.
- They collect customer feedback and interact with them to understand the overall user experience. Then, the data is analyzed to infer their needs and understand their problems. Then, the product design will respond to those needs and ensure an enhanced user experience for them.
- PM’s job also involves research and analysis of the market, the competition, and business goals. This work helps to understand the features that the competition lacks and include them in their product.
- They evaluate ideas to plan the product development. Features are defined and prioritized. This process involves collaborating with cross-functional teams.
- They communicate with the senior management and the product stakeholders to align them around the product’s vision. They work with a product owner to define the priorities for product development.
- During product development, PMs keep track of the progress, analyze the reports, and document the entire process. In addition, they address any issues within the team to ensure its efficiency.
- After the team develops the complete product, Product Managers are involved in the promotion and sales of the product. They work with the marketing team to convey product features and benefits to align customer needs with product features.
- Once the product is shipped, they analyze the sales and usage data to draw insights into its performance. This evaluation helps with rolling out new versions or new products.
What skills and experience does it require?
Even though the job description varies with the company, one must possess specific hard skills and soft skills to become a successful product manager.
- The important one is, no doubt, managerial skills. A product development team often comprises multiple cross-functional teams. This diversity brings creative insights into product development; however, it is essential to harmonize different thought processes and skills.
- PMs have to be good leaders and be willing to take the initiative. They need to influence and motivate the team to increase its efficiency.
- It helps to possess enough technical knowledge and expertise in the area or field of the product you are developing. In addition, it helps outline the features, identify performance issues and understand the technical requirements.
- The job often requires researching consumer needs, market opportunities, and competition. Thus, one must know how to dig deep and perform extensive research to collect relevant data.
- The analysis of the collected data follows any research. Good analytical skills help to make informed decisions and solve complex problems.
- Strategic thinking is an important skill needed to define the product vision and plan how to execute it. A PM must think critically, logically, and rationally while making decisions.
- Good communication skills are paramount as they are always in constant communication with the team, other managers, seniors, stakeholders, clients, and customers. Such communication involves both verbal and written forms.
- Basic marketing skills are needed as they are involved in product promotion. These skills help convey the benefits and deliver the products as PMs interact with consumers and clients.
How to become a product manager?
No formal qualification is required to become a product manager. It’s the technical knowledge and managerial skills that matter. Although, there may be variations in the job description depending upon the industry and the company.
However, many institutions offer product management and product manager courses and certification programs. Although it’s not mandatory, it helps to get the basics right. Also, some companies prefer to hire people with certification.
Any working professional can become a product manager. It can be a developer who possesses leadership qualities, a team lead who wishes to upgrade, a manager with enough technical knowledge, or a marketing professional who works closely with the product. It can be in the same field or a different one.
Either way, for a professional aspiring to become a PM, one must master the product management fundamentals and understand the product lifecycle. One can do this through a course. After that, they need to acquire both hard and soft skills.
If the person has some work experience in the same field, transitioning might be easier as they already have the technical knowledge. However, if the person is from a different area and already has the managerial skills, they need to acquire the specific technical skills for that particular product manager role.
Conclusion
Product management is all about strategizing to ensure the organization builds a quality product that offers the best solutions to the consumers while aligning with the organization’s vision.
