What does it mean to be a product manager?
Do you know what does it mean? I didn’t. It’s easy to lose ourselves on definitions these days.
I mean, of course, “someone who manages products” answer has come up on my mind… But I didn’t really know what did that mean in terms of duties in day-to-day tasks and overall project participation.
I started wondering why a term apparently so simple could mean so much… Until it sparked me: the process of creating products has a name — and yes it’s gonna be silly — PRODUCTION. And oh boy that’s changed…
Human production has changed a lot throughout the history — the very own concept of product has changed many times. Specially in the technology industry, we live in a close to daily revolution that ends transforming both what we think when we talk about product and how we build them.
Although, it has not always been true the need for a person focused on the product to be developed, or the process itself.
That started to change with the massification of products developed during the globalization process. With people now having radio, TV’s, cars, and internet, a whole new bunch of products began to be developed, which made the processes complexity to go up and generated new markets to be administrated. The products became more user focused and the necessity for a multidisciplinary team more and more evident.
When a product succeeds, it’s because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it’s the product manager’s fault. — Marty Cagan
In that context acts the product manager. This professional should act as the interface between the 3 big areas of modern product development — UX, Tech and Business — and is responsible for creating and executing a product strategy conciliating the user’s interests with the company’s interests and building the best UX that is technically feasible to be implemented in the time and with the resources available. A PM is usually part of a team that contains other PMs. Each PM has an specific job, to look into a product or feature of a product “by himself” — here reads that their tasks doesn’t usually depend on other PMs, except when working on interconnected products or features. When working at a small startup or on a completely different product it’s fine and usual to have a lone PM.
One way I found to learn a little more on how does that objectify as work after all, was to talk to two friends who’s been a product managers at iFood here in Brazil for quite a time now. I asked them how would they describe their routine when involved in a project. They agreed that about 35% of the time available doing data analysis, reading and creating graphs, questioning everything you see. Another 35% of the time talking to people, understanding different points of view for each stakeholder and discovering the real size of that problem: investigating why that problem is a problem and why hasn’t anybody solved it yet. About 15% of the time organizing everything, designing the solution based on everything you saw; and the other 15% managing the construction of the solution, ensuring that everything is right and tying any loose ends. Also, they emphasize that the PM must not create solutions himself, he must dive right in the problems and be able to share very precisely what he learns to the rest of the team. The designers and developers are the ones who will create the solutions, the PM is there to guide them through it.
Another thing really important is to engage everyone in your team from the very beginning. Even if the developers are not getting any task to code yet they should participate in the discussions, as they may give insights that the PM and the designers might not think of.
If you, like myself, fell in love with the idea of building resounding and helpful products to solve real world’s and real people’s problems, maybe you should check more on the subject. Finally I leave you with some good references to help your starting steps forward becoming a product manager:
[1]: The product manager contribution, Silicon Valley Product Group
[2]: Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. Marty Cagan.
[3]: Historical evolution of the product manager role, Mind the Product
[4]: Product Management: Start Here, Silicon Valley Product Group
[5]: What exactly is a product manager? Mind the Product
