Product Management for Dummies
A year ago I was talking to a professor about how I could get closer to my dream of becoming a Product Manager. Being a software engineer student, I was told that the “usual progress” is to do a few years of engineering work before making the career jump. At a certain point in the conversation he asked me what my idea of a product manager was. The question shouldn’t have caught me by surprise, but it did. Even so, I was pretty quick answering — “I think that the product manager is the guy that makes sure that the product the team is creating, is the product that the customers want”. Even though I still stand by that answer, I want to reformulate it a bit.
Being a Team Player
Defining Product management isn’t easy. The work of a great product manager might often be invisible, as PM’s don’t produce any palpable/tangible work.
Software engineers write code, designers create mockups and UI, product managers don’t really produce anything. Instead a PM represents the bridge between the team and the users. Good product managers should be able to prioritise the right things and lead the team with key decisions while maintaining the collective feeling that everyones input is valuable. Being a *good* product manager is (ultimately) being a team player.
Testing & User Feedback
A product manager must know when to get the product out the door. In the end, what matters is getting the product in user’s hands. This timing is sometimes tricky, while the team should be constantly testing their products getting outside feedback is super important, and we never know if the product is really ready to go outside, until it does. Once it’s out there, prepare to get your hands dirty and get to work, take notes, make it personal and talk to users (make sure you know who your target audience is). A product manager should *often* make users opinion their own, use that information and add it to the end product.
Company Vision
As I said before, a product manager should help the team make key decisions. This goes hand in hand with knowing exactly what the company behind you wants you to create. Make sure to have the right correlation between CEOs/VP vision, team inputs (there should be space for creativity) and end user. In other words, have the right balance between the user’s and the business needs.
As a 24 year old guy, I still have a long journey ahead of me. I hope in a few years, with more experience on my back, I can read this and think that at least I got some of this stuff right.
Some biography I recommend:
Ben Horowitz — Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.