Introduction to Product Management

If someone had told you that the most challenging and demanding task in IT today is that of a product manager, then respect the intellect of that individual. He/She was indeed telling the truth. As an IT professional, Product Management is the toughest challenge that can be thrown towards you.

Why am I saying this? This is what I have experienced myself while working at a data security product startup firm and will quote real incidences to support my claim. You, the readers, be the best judge after reading the entire series and then decide to either agree or disagree with it.

Let’s Begin:

To understand the challenges lying ahead a product manager, we should first have a fair understanding of what is expected out of product managers. Let’s have a look:

The Roles and Responsibilities of a Product Manager:

The entire ownership of the product lies on the product manager. He is responsible for:

1. Constantly looking out for innovative ideas and services in the IT industry, in general and within there own domain/industry in particular.
2. Collect ideas via performing customer research and interviews and by following industry treads.
3. Among all the ideas, select the one which is in accordance of the objective of the company.
4. Setup product roadmap.
5. Refine and present the idea to a diversified audience in a language that they can understand (Business/Technical/financial).
6. Start iterative process of product design.
7. Supervise the product development with regular communication with the development and testing teams.
8. Perform user acceptance testing.
9. Ensure a smooth production deployment.
10. Collect feedback from end users and channelize it back to enhance or fine tune the features and services offered.
11. Measure the impact of the product on user experience and behavior and quantify it for the consumption of decision makers.

Fig. 1: The tasks and responsibilities of a Product Manager

If you are a technology company, even your CEO is not connected as closely as your product manager, to the product on which your entire company is based on. A product manager has to work with multiple moving pieces, manage trade offs and regularly take decisions while dealing with ambiguity. Among all this chaos, they are supposed to deliver a product which should enhance customer satisfaction and experience.

In my subsequent posts on this topic, I will discuss each and every aspects of product management listed above along with real incidences from my own project.

So until then, take care. Bye.