The Role of Productmanagement

Enabling teams to excel and deliver

I’ll begin this course about Product management with a telling a story about a project I once worked in as interim Product manager, as it nicely sketches the key role product management can play in startup environments. It was a nice and small startup with a small office of just 2 rooms and a rooftop terrace.

There were already a bunch of junior business analysts plus one person for office management in the “business room”, where as the tech guys were a wild mix of SysOps, Backend-Gurus, Javascript and front-end guys plus two interns working on their projects. The founders of the company were enthusiastic about the growth possibilities and the vast bag of wild ideas they had for their baby.

The first day was even more overwhelming than usual — not only where there about 20 names to remember, but it seemed everybody was working on different projects appeared on different times at the office and no one knew what anyone else was doing.

Before I started working as a product manager I often wondered whether this position was needed at all for small startups. At this project I saw why it was indeed: When no founder can concentrate on the product-management role (in this case the guys were fully occupied with preparing their Series A investment round) pure chaos is the result. Note that chaos for some time and certain circumstances is not necessarily a bad thing, great things are build on the edge of chaos as a saying goes.

But I was there to end the chaos and get things going into one common direction. When I finally had a rough overview on what everybody was working on it became clear that work on the new homepage got stuck even if it was really close to a final state. I could jumpstart that project by listing obvious bugs (there was no person dedicated to Quality assurance at that time) choosing only one developer to fix them. He on the other hand gave me a short intro on their rather nifty content management system so I could fill in some content that was obviously missing. In the meantime I met with the founders to flesh out a roadmap for the months to come.

After some days we could finally take the homepage live. We did this on a friday afternoon which is usually not recommend for live-deployments as you don’t want to fix bugs on the weekend, but the CTO promised to be available on the weekend and take care or even rollback if any major issues would occur. Luckily, everything went fine.

In the coming weeks I helped the team to establish a process that ensured better planning and better communication. Starting from pure chaos where some people arrived around lunch time and started smoking and drinking coffee on the rooftop to very basic steps really made a difference for the team: Having daily standup meetings of about 10 Minutes and 10 o’clock, forcing people working on similar topics to sit close to each other and opening up a central Kanban board for making progress visible. This boosted communication and transparency by 100%.

So what is the role of product management in a nutshell? I like to describe the product manager as an enabler. He connects the dots, he helps out if anything is needed and most importantly he provides structure and direction for a team. By this he enables any team-member to do what she does best!

But there is another side of product management, arguably the more important one: Not only does the PM enable team-members to do their work, he also essentially defines what theiy are working on. He essentially creates and defines content, user experience, features: in short everything that is part of a product — in our case a website or app. Of course he cannot and should not do this alone he works together with experts in all these fields but especially in smaller startups he should be competent to give meaningful and especially helpful inputs to all these fields. Most importantly, the product-manager should be the one person in a company who understands their customers best. A good product manager will never take decisions based on his personal preferences but always on what he knows works best for (potential) customers of her company.

As it was nicely put here, the PM is a kind of mini-CEO of the product. And besides the real CEO I very much doubt that there is any position as diverse and challenging as the one of the product manager. We will cover those areas in some detail and with a lot of links in the next sections.

P.S.: Here you find another nice piec by Josh Elman about the Role of Product-Management.