What does Product Management mean?

07 Sep 2014 . category: product-management . Comments
#entrepreneurship #startups

Last weekend, I met my friends from my previous company Accenture, and depending on their questions about my new job, I have soon realized that they are thinking that I have moved away from the technology side of the software business, and all I do is reporting now. They felt like I am into a project managerial role! “So all you do now is give status updates to your client and manage the budget?” said one of my friend. 😮

Time to clear the smoke.

Firstly, Project Manager and Product Manager are two different roles. However, it’s good when a product manager adopts a project managerial skills. My CEO said I could pick project manager traits on the job.

Product Management:

Product Management lies in the intersection of Designers, Engineers, and Business. Below is the diagram that pops up from a quick google image search.

[Recollecting discussion about the role during my interview]. Product manager’s job is to make space for engineers and designers, so they produce their best on the job. It means anything that takes to get best from all the teams with which PM majorly interacts.

PM’s responsibilities vary from each company, However, since I am currently associated with a SaaS company, I will outline it as the following points:

☑ Entirely responsible for the success of a product. ☑ Enables engineers and designers give their best. ☑ Most importantly, PM is NOT the boss of anyone just because the title has ‘manager’ in it.

There can be various reasons for failure of a product,

☒ Failing to identify the right worthy market. ☒ Failing to properly plan the roadmap. ☒ Failing to efficiently prioritize tasks. ☒ Failing to calculate estimations near to accuracy. ☒ Failing to set right expectations across teams. and so on..

All the negatives mentioned above account to PM because market research, product roadmap, sprint planning, and setting right expectations across teams through clear communication are PM’s responsibilities.

To be honest, when I heard “You will be ultimately responsible for success/failure of a product” during the role discussion in my interview I doubted my confidence, but then the co-founder said he would help me for a couple of months down the lane as he will be heading the engineering team. (Background: I applied for a customer success manager job but then interviewed for PM role due to my software engineering track and cross-functional team interests of mine, so a lot of PM role discussion occurred).

Disclaimer: Sorry for using some certain terms like Product Roadmap/Sprint planning and others if any that’s not clear. In upcoming posts, I shall clarify them.

If you have any other points to add what product management mean then, please comment them below.