Product Management 101: Introduction

I’m starting a series of posts to document all of the lessons I have learnt as a product manager overseeing both B2C and B2B products, with some launching and flourishing and some as failed lessons. Hopefully sharing my experiences as a product manager will resonate, inspire, or challenge you to reach greater heights.

What is Product Management?

I think of product management as both a science and an art. On one side, there’s very methodological approaches such as the The Lean Startup. On the other side, we are talking about consumer psychology and motivation. It is important to achieve a balance and define what kind of product manager you want to be. Even the role of product manager is evolving — there are technical or business oriented product managers and they both serve a different purpose. However, at the end of the day, our main concern as a product manager is the same.

So whether you are from a technical or a business background, the one and ultimate question you need to ask yourself is:

Am I serving my customers better?

Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you need to jump on the support lines, write code to enhance the load-balancing of your server clusters, or A/B testing branding strategies, it all boils down to the same question.

It’s okay to recognize that sometimes the hardest part is formulating that question itself. You will need product vision, leadership, and deep understanding of your market in order to start even asking the right questions. In the end, you will come up with a clear set of KPIs to measure your outcome, feasible solutions to a customer pain point, and an overall better definition of your customers. Defining these core strategy as a product managers will force us to iterate and strive towards our product vision.

Thanks for reading and follow me on my journey in improving as a product manager.