Product Managers: What are they and what do they do

First of all, sorry for my english, it’s my first post in english.

You’ve probably heard about the so called “Product Manager”, but do you really know what a Product Manager does?

Let’s begin with the existing literature to define what product manager’s role is. According to Marty Cagan, in his book, Inspired, a product manager works to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. By this definition, a product manager tried to find a market that highly values the product and one where the product is used in the best way by their consumers.

Other authors have a more simplistic definition for product management: the intersection between business, user experience and technology. As illustrated in the image below.

You may have heard the latter definition, as it is the clearest definition, while still include a wide range of activities that may be present at this area. Of course this definition brings questions, such as:

Does this “Technology Guru” know how to code?

How many MBA’s so they need to have?

I never had visual creativity to create something, what now?

So does that mean a Product Manager doesn’t need to know anything about the other two areas? Yes you do… you have to be passionate and practice all of them with an active routine. Remember that the goal here is to be great in all three, but you’ll hardly become that unicorn ProductManager, so the ideal is to have one expertise and exercise the other areas so they become an adjunct strength.

I will cite my example, my current job is not as product manager, but I identify with the position. I am graduated and I have a good experience in technology, especially web development, many year ago I thought about my skills and weaknesses then I realized that I needed to know further other areas, such as marketing, design and administration. I was still very layman and had a very “square” mindset when I went into an MBA in 2009, with the objective to learn the “old way”.

During these classes I understood that all I learning there I could learn on my own, and that’s what I did. I have studied, learned and shared the knowledge through presentations to the class. Along the way, whilw I still pursuing my MBA, at the way my colleague (Ricardo Dantas) and I decided to start a company, that’s when the need to know all areas became more emphatic than before. Two developers starting an internet company, learning from all of our mistakes and successes.

With that, I placed myself with more authority to other areas because I had to have intellectual subsidy to judge a good job from a bad or how to search, introduce and find customers who can buy my products.

So, in the school of life I found my place and figured out that everything I had previously thought was not madness. I could be a professional with an IT background and be actively involved in other key departments to launch and maintain a product and keep its consumers happy.

This was the first post in a series where I’ll write about product management concept. Feel free to share your experience with product management below.

proof reading by Willian Araújo