What is a Product and Product Management?
There has been a tremendous growth in new-age companies and in the last decade which has also given birth to the new roles in the digital space. The one role which has caught everyone’s eye is Product Management. Furthermore, in a world, where a user has a large number of choices, has low switching cost and is influenced from the public ratings, reviews and recommendations; product managers matter more than ever.
But question is, Who is a Product Manager and what does he do?
A Product Manager is not a manager of anybody but the product. The Venn diagram below sums up the entire existence of all the Product Managers out there. You are at the intersection of major stakeholders and enable a continuous flow of communication by removing the noise.
The role of the PMs and the responsibilities change across different industries and different companies. Therefore, let’s focus on the core tenants of it:
- Identifying Profitable Opportunities — by understanding the market, overseeing the products already in the market and researching into user’s needs
- Defining the Product — deciding which features to be present in what releases based on market, target users, and impact of each feature on different user groups
- Guiding the development — by writing requirements, user stories and prioritizing features based on effort and impact
- Scaling the product — defining Go to Market Strategies, understanding the user interactions, experimenting and focusing on what’s working and leaving out what’s not, deriving and using market insights
- Product Strategy — Managing road-map as a function of the market, keep product goals aligned with the company’s goals
In a nutshell, a PM is a researcher, a prioritizer and a presenter but most importantly, responsible for the ultimate success of the product.
So, what’s a product then?
A product can be anything. My laptop is a product, my phone is a product, medium.com is a product and the web browser, I am using, is a product. However, it’s not always the case that a product manager is in charge of an entire device or software. In many startups, and especially large companies, product managers are in charge of different sections or features. For example, when you’re using Facebook you are actually using multiple products like photos, news feed, comment section etc. At such large companies, each feature is so vital and complex that it’s usually assigned to a group of people, called a product team, to manage it.
But there are also situations when product managers are not split up by the features but rather split up by platform. For instance, at a company, each platform (Android, iOS and Website) may have its own in-charge managing everything.
These are just different models of working. So now, we should be clear that as far as the role of a product manager goes, a product can be anything from an entire real-life product as a consumer sees it, or in some cases split up into smaller sections for larger companies or complex products.
