Day 95 —PM series 1/5: “Who, What, How”
For the past few years, I’ve been asked by designers and developers about what role product managers play in the team. It seems to me that because of different product management styles and different PMs demonstrate various core competencies, sometimes designers and developers can get confused. Is PM just a “talker?” What do they actually do? How did they come up with ideas and requirements? I might have some answers for you.
I was a product managers for 2 years at a car manufacturing company, worked on product strategy, production planning and monitoring; Also, I was a proto-PM for a year, supporting a product manager who has limited strategic planning and project management skill. Therefore, I’m sharing my experience and knowledge about Product Management in this new series with the following topics:
To kick of the PM series, let’s address the biggest confusion head on: What is Product Management? PM can come in all size and shapes, the way they manage products are usually driven by their education/ work background, or industry needs. In order to clarify who they are and what they do, let’s break it down in the following structure:
- Who’s PM
- What does a PM do
- How to manage products
Who becomes PM
From my experience, there are mainly 4 types of PM:
- Business school graduates: Probably the majority of PMs come from this type of background, and it’s considered more of a traditional career path. Students with business school training are excited to test their knowledge in the playing field, and tackle real world problems.
- Business operations: In enterprise software product world, this is a common career transition that one would like to pivot from business operations to product management. This is a logical transition, given they are either the users or someone who has been handling client complaints around using the software product, they possess the business knowledge acquired lots of product knowledge through client interactions.
- IT related background: More than taking instruction and building a product, some IT related professional want to be involved in the early planning, and gradually transit their career into product management role. This is quite common in enterprise software world, because once a person acquire a specific domain knowledge, they can have impact more than just building but defining and planning for the product.
- Former UX designers: UX designers are trained to dig into user’s mind and extract insights to help form the product or UX strategy. Because the big overlap between UX and PM in the tasks like “understanding the user needs” and “distill insights and define a direction”, there are more and more designers are transiting their career into product management field.
I’m sure there are other types of background I didn’t capture in above, and I’m happy to learn from you if you can leave me a comment. Now, let’s move on to “what a PM does”
What does a PM do
There are many things a PM must/should/could/would do (yeah, you’re MoSCoW-ed!). In order to address this common question by designers and developers, the simplest way to say it is: “Everything about products that we can’t find a specialist to do it.” Because a PM can outsource almost everything to an agency, there’s really no other definition except for “who’s responsible for the product success” (although that has been challenged in the 3-legged-stool or balanced team setting, too)
Nevertheless, there are still some common tasks for PM to take on in their product management routine, let’s take a quick look here:
Business Planning
One of the initial tasks of PMs is to understand how the product or product portfolio fit into the business strategy. For example, why do we need a new product? Is the investment justify the return? What kind of return? Is it bringing more transactions, improve client relationship, increase adoption and usage, or anything that has a direct impact on the top line of the balance sheet?
Product Portfolio
By understanding the business need, a wise PM can start conceiving their Product Portfolio Strategy. What kind of product is needed to provide a holistic solution for the customer? Do we need another product that share the branding but serve different functions for a specific types of user group (e.g. a compact car for urban commuter, or a min-van for house wives/ husbands)? Or should just build an API to compliment the current offerings, orquickly fill the gap from the client request?
Product Strategy
Once the product portfolio strategy is set, PMs can conceive a product strategy for a specific product in the portfolio. Similar to plan for the Product Portfolio, product strategy often includes stating the general strategy, competitive analysis, product/market fit, desirable outcome, resourcing, execution plan, timeline, cost, success metrics, product launching plan, marketing plan, projected sales, and post production evaluation.
Customer/ User Insights
One of the key things that largely determines product success is how much the production solution address the customer/user needs. If we create something that doesn’t solve any user problem nor bring any joy for the customers/ users, the product could easily fail. Therefore, gathering insights from customers and users is one of the most important job in the product creation journey. This is the part that quite often requires collaboration between UX & Product to 1) using UX research technique to find out the hidden needs, simply asking users don’t get you the real insights; 2) using Design Thinking to model the research data and distill tangible insights to consolidate the product direction.
Marketing & Sales Planning
Sometimes, or a lot of times, people mistake that product success is purely about product quality. If we can’t deliver the product to users’ hands, or the quality differentiator is in the nuances that’s not easy for general customers to extract, product success, more often than not, was because of the successful marketing plan. For example, if you ask iPhone users why do they think iPhone is better than Android, I’d bet you that a lot of the iPhone customers never have an Android and can’t specify the advantage of an iPhone. There are a lot of similar examples, which I’ll describe in details in tomorrow’s post.
Project Management
In the setting of there’s no project managers but only product managers, PM will have to wear the hat of Project Management. Profession training and certificate like PMBOK usually helps bridging the gap between Product and Project Management. I’ll describe in details in the later post of this PM series.
Product Related Task Coordination
Whether it’s getting legal/ compliance’s approval, resolving last minute quality issue, or negotiating with contractors about price, scope, timeline, there are a lot of miscellaneous task that a product manager has to take on. Unlike some common believes that “product manager is just the talker”, there’s a lot of blue-collar work that’s involved through out the journey. And yes, booking meeting rooms and buying donuts, although not required, are some of the common tasks.
How to manage products (well)
With all that said above, doesn’t seem like there’s much else left to talk about, does it? However, how do we differentiate a good PM vs. a mediocre one? From my personal experience, there are three aspects:
Product Vision
A great product managers not only get things done, but also “get the right things done and inspire people”. Visionary leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are some of the successful examples. Both of them emphasize the importance of user experience and customer obsession, and strive to build something that’s beyond the “norm” in the time.
It’s true that it is already a lot of hard work that requires PM to sweat, but the question we really need to ask ourselves, what’s the value of putting out a mediocre product? What’s the ROI of it? Does it worth all the effort when we’re not clear about the direction? Shouldn’t we involve users early on to address their pain and need, or should we just “spray and pray”?
Market Acumen
Sometimes when people ask me what a PM does and they’re not expecting a long or vague answer (like designers love to say “it depends”), I’d just answer: “Product-Market Fit”. This is something that designers and developers can understand and know that PMs are not talkers but really help define the direction of the product by understanding the market. There are many means like research and testing to determine if the product could be a good fit in the market; I’ll elaborate in the following post in the PM series.
People Management
A great product requires a team effort. One of the many things that PMs need to do on a daily basis is product leadership. PMs need to constantly inspire the team, align the team to be on the same directions, handling difficult conversations, negotiation, resolving conflicts, and motivating team member, boosting morale. Project management is not a top-down job, it’s a team effort and it’s crucial for PMs to know how to influence people to reach the common goal.
Conclusion
- PMs come from all sorts of background, and each of them has their strength and areas that require other specialists’ support;
- Also, PMs wear many hats, but the most important part is to understand the market, and bring business, design, and tech together to create great products;
- The key differentiator to make a great PM is to have a vision, tap into the market pulse, and have excellent influencing skills to work with the team.
Do you have experience working as a PM? What are some pros tips you have? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
