What it’s Like to be a Product Manager
It’s my first time writing, and it has actually been a longed dream for a while. Mainly because I’m not sure what to write, and the other thing because of the curse of procrastination. But now, I decided to write about one of the thing that I’m passionate about, which is Product Management. I will start by describing What It’s Like to be a Product Manager.
The Circles of Life as PM
Some of you might have know the infamous PM Venn Diagram.
Coupled with what Marty Cagan said in his book Inspired, the job of the product manager is
to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible.
Translated to the diagram, it becomes:
Business — Above all, Product Management is about business. It’s about maximising the business value from a product, which is the Return on Investment (ROI).
This, in my opinion is the part of Valuable from Marty Cagan description. It’s the job of a PM to find a product that is valuable in customer eyes that it would provide ROI to the company.
Technology — A great product needs to be built, and it would be such a shame if a great idea stays a great idea just because it cannot be built at the moment because of technical issue. This does not mean that PM needs to be able to open a Visual Studio and code, but it helps a lot if PM understand the technology stack and be able to comprehend the level of effort in building a feature inside a product. Moreover, it’s more paramount when we are spending lots of our time geeking with the development team.
This is the Feasible part where the product needs to be feasible enough to be built, and that’s the job of a PM to make sure it actually can be built.
User Experience (UX) — The last thing that people often neglect, is that PM shall be the voice of the customer inside the whole company. This also means, PM needs to be at least passionate about UX for their product. This does not mean that PM needs to be able to sketch a beautiful mockup, or be an attention-detailed freak who would scream if a pixel is missed (although that might help). But it means that PM ought to go out there and talk to the customer, digging their needs, their problems, come up with solution and validate it to the customer.
This incorporate the Usable part where the product needs to be a usable one by the user in a way user would find it user friendly and actually help solving their problem in the first place.
A Bit of Change
However, throughout my daily life as PM, I found out that sometimes, there is another thing that needs to be part of PM attention as well. It is probably because in my current job, I was tasked with leading the product team. Not to mention, being the go-to-guy whenever everyone needs information about a product or when there’s a request. Nonetheless, after discussing it with friends of mine, we do agree that People is part of the PM’s concern. The diagram then changed a bit to:
People — can be classified into two different groups, internal facing and external facing.
External facing — has been described above, where we talk about PM being the front-line for UX research, for getting information and feedback from users, and for making sure that we are building an usable product.
Internal facing — is where PM is responsible for being the communication hub for various departments inside the company. PM is the central station for cross functional team within the company. From the development team, the stakeholders, the C-Level, the Marketing Department, the Customer Success Department, the Human Resources, you name it. It is PM’s job to be the communicator between all those departments, making sure things go smoothly and the teamwork sparks.
Once I heard someone said that being a PM does not mean that you’re the one who needs to come up with creative things such as a new concept, a new product. The ideas are floating everywhere, from customers, to other department, you just have to be the one making sure everything is connected, and the team can get what they need in order to make a product that everyone loves.
Moreover, nowadays, there are lots of demands for the PM to act as the leader to the development team. This means PM needs to start poking at the People side of the team. Being a leader is not all about commanding the team to do things. It means PM needs to be the one who laid the vision, as well as the servant for the members. It ranges from evangelising the product vision to the point of helping solving soft problem within the member of the team. And all of that require PM to have the People skills such as communication skills, listening skills, empathy, etc.
Sounds tough? Well, that’s the reality. PM’s job varies from company to company, but I believe, the underlying elements that need to be there are the Business, Technology and People.
