Product Management, an Overview

This image is what explains the Product Manager in a simple and straight way.

Who is a product manager?

• Responsible for the ultimate success of the product, the product may be a complete product, a section, or a feature to which he/she is assigned to.
• Responsible for the product planning and execution throughout the Product Life-cycle, including: gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, defining the product vision, and working closely with engineering, sales, marketing and support to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met.
• The person even involves in conversation with company chairs, stakeholders, users to get a better picture of how to build a profitable product.

Product Manager and Project Manager are not the same

Sometimes people confuse between these two roles and end up concluding that both are the same. Whereas this isn’t true.

Product Manager

Here the Product Manager is assigned goals which he need to achieve via whatever way is feasible. This can be explained via an example where Product Manager is assigned a goal to increase the user base of a product by 10% by the end of the month. Now it’s left to the Product Manager in whatever way he achieves, he may alter the existing feature or add a new feature to achieve the goal.

Project Manager

The Project Manager has specific requirements and an execution mode to follow. For example A Project Manager assigned to construct a building has to make sure that the building is built according to the plan provided to him and tied to the budget of the project. He further cannot experiment in the process.

Types of Product Managers

There are different subsets of Product Managers available to name a few are.

1. Internal Product Managers

This is where one solves problems of user internal to your organization or enables your organization to satisfy the needs of your customers. The PM role in this subset is more focused on outcome and output.

2. B2C Product Managers

The product built here involves a lot of experimentation and data analysis as it in most cases reaches the end users or the customer and has a large user base. This is said to be one of the most challenging roles and needs to be less or no buggy.

3. B2B Product Managers

The person who buys the end product here isn’t an end user over here, this mainly involves the development of professional software for business or other companies.The user base is often less over here and product is often built in bundles of releases.

Essentials for the role of a Product Manager

• Conversation skills: This is a must for a Product Manager as the role involves interacting with higher officials, colleagues, users and many more. The situations will arise when one even need to interview the end users to get feedback from them about the product and the sections in which the product needs to be improved.
• Keeping up with the industry: This involves one to keep track of the happenings around the industry, new launches and the competitors. Given are the few websites listed which are helpful in providing value to the section mentioned (Techmeme, Hacker News, Product Hunt etc).