What is Product Management?

“The job of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible”

-Marty Cagan, Founding Partner of Silicon Valley Product Group

“The Intersection between business, user experience, and technology”

-Martin Eriksson

*a good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners of all three.

• Business
  • Product management is above all else a business function, focused on maximizing business value from a product.
• User Experience (UX)
  • The PM is the voice of the customer inside the business, and thus must be passionate about customers and the specific problems they’re trying to solve.
    • Examples of UX Research
      • Getting out to talk to customers
      • Testing the product
      • Getting Feedback first hand
      • Working closely with internal and external UX Designers and Researchers
• Technology
  • PM’s do not need to be able to code, but must understand the technology stack – and most importantly, the level of effort involved – is crucial to making the right decisions.
  • In an Agile world PM’s spend more time with the development team than with anyone else inside the business, and need a shared language and understanding with their engineers.

The PM Role

“[Product Management] is a very broad role. You have to be able to be really good at strategy, be inspirational, and understand the long-term picture. At the same time, you have to be really good at the operational side and making things happen.”

-Tanya Cordrey, former Chief Digital Officer at the Guardian

• Setting a vision for the product
  • The PM should research their market, customer, and the problem the customer is trying to solve.  
    • Assimilate huge amounts of information
      • Qualitative feedback from customers
      • Quantitative data from analytics tools
      • Statistics
      • Research Reports
      • Market Trends
    • Mix all of the information with a healthy dose of creativity to define a vision for their project.
  • Once the vision is in place the PM must spread the word throughout their business. Almost evangelical about the utopia that their product vision represents.
    • Driving the vision forward is the first area where the management and leadership overlap.
    • The success of a product manager – and subsequently that of their product – relies on every team member, from sales to development, understanding the vision and becoming at least a little bit passionate about it.
    • Once the vision is established the PM must then work toward building an actionalbe, strategic plan —- a roadmap.
      • Roadmap componants
        • Incremental Improvements
        • Problem Validation
        • Iterative Design and development that takes the product step by step closer to the final vision.
      • Success along the roadmap comes back to the process of communicating the vision. Done correctly and the team will throw itself in coming up with better designs, better code, and better solutions to the customers problem.
      • Roadmap process is detail oriented as PM works day in and day out with the development team as a product owner. PM is constantly defining and iterating the product as it evolves, solving problems as they arise and closely managing scope so the product goes to market on time and on budget.
      • Once the product is finally out in the market, the product manager should be spending their time poring over data and talking to customers face to face about the product to discover how they use it.
        • Did it solve the right problem?
        • Do the customers understand the products value?
        • Will they pay for the product?
      • In larger organizations the product managers and leaders are probably not doing these things step by step for just one product or feature. They’re doing this for a dozen products or features at any one time, all at different stages in their life cycle.
      • A product manager is continuously going back and forth between the 10,000 feet view and the 2-inch view.”

-Ellen Chisa, VP of Product at Lola

• “Product Management is the glue that holds together all the various functions and roles across a company that speaks different languages”

– Ken Norton, Product Partner at GV

• The greatest challenge for product managers is that the job is not just about hard skills, but more about the soft skills of persuasion, negotiation, storytelling, vision setting, and communication.
• Kaizen, improving the business continuoulsy while always drving for innovation and evolution.
• Genchi genbutsu, going to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.
• Goal of product development is to not only understand the customer and their needs but to align the product development with them.
• Agile Manifesto
  • We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
    • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
    • Working software over comprehensive documentation
    • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
    • Responding to change over following a plan
  • That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.