Table of Contents
What is Product Management?
Daily tasks include a variety of strategic management and tactical missions. Most product managers or owners don’t take on all of these responsibilities. At least some of them belong to other teams or departments in most companies.
But Most Product Professionals Spend Most Of Their Time:
Conduct Research: Research to better understand the market, users, and competitors.
Development strategy: Reframe the industry knowledge gained into an overall strategic plan for your product, including objectives, a high-level overview of the product, and possibly a rough timeline.
Communication plans: Develop a strategic work plan using a product roadmap and present it to your company’s key stakeholders: executives, investors, development teams, etc. Continuous communication between your cross-functional teams throughout the development process and beyond.
Development Coordination: Assuming you’ve received the green light to move forward with your strategic product plan, coordinate with the relevant teams (product marketing, development, etc.) to begin executing the plan.
Act on feedback and data analysis: Finally, after you’ve built, tested, and launched the product, learn through data analysis and get direct feedback from users on what’s working, what’s not working, and what should be added. Work with relevant teams to incorporate this feedback into future product iterations.
What is Not Product Management?
Product managers who have the day-to-day details of product development is a common mistakes. As we described on our Product Management vs Project Management page, this is the role of a project manager.
The Strategic Role of Product Management
Product management is a strategic function. Assign product managers the task of identifying the overall rationale for a product: the “why?”
They are also responsible for communicating product goals and plans to the rest of the company. You need to make sure everyone is working toward a common organizational goal.
Product management encompasses a wide range of ongoing strategic tasks. It would help if you were not responsible for the basic details of the development process.
What is the Product Management Process?
There is no “right” way to achieve a product. Processes will evolve and adapt to the organization, the stage of the product lifecycle, and the personal preferences of executives and product team members.
But the discipline has developed some consensus regarding best practices. Although rigid adherence is not required and there is not the same level of fanaticism that one might find when talking about agility, the core principles are widely accepted.
Issue Definition
It all starts with identifying a high-value problem for the customer. After that, people or organizations try to do something, and they can’t. Or, if they can, it’s expensive, time-consuming, resource-intensive, inefficient, or just plain uncomfortable.
Quantify The Opportunity
There are many problems and pain points, but not all are worth solving. It is when product managers change their customer-facing hats to corporate hats.
To justify the investment in creating a new product or solution, product management must be able to answer the following questions and make a business case based on the answers found:
What Is The Total Addressable Market?
Is the problem or pain severe enough to consider alternative solutions?
Are they willing to pay for an alternative solution (or is there another way to monetize the answer)?
Once product management has evaluated the potential market, they can approach it if the opportunity is big enough.
Researching Potential Solutions
Product management can now focus on targeting customer problems and pain points. You need to cast a wide net of possible solutions and not rule them out too quickly. Suppose the organization already has a proprietary technology or intellectual property or a specific area of expertise to give the company an advantage. If so, these potential solutions will likely use it in some way.
However, this does not mean that creation managers should now start writing requirements and involve the product development team. It would help if you validated these candidates with the target market first, although it’s wise to take some of these ideas to the tech team to ensure they’re at least viable. Product management often develops personas to see if these cohorts are interested in any of the pictures in the spreadsheet.
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