Debunking some common myths in Product Management
As the Product Management career is increasingly becoming popular among professionals from different career tracks, there are a lot of questions and myths that are doing rounds concerning the role of product manager. We have tried to bust some of these common myths.
Product Manager is responsible for coming up with ideas for the product.
There is all hype about product managers being those smart folks who solve challenging problems, come up with great ideas and build world-class products. We have discussed these as in how the truth is far from it, in our previous articles. The very concept that idea generation is one of the critical product management jobs is a big myth. In reality, most ideas come from customer feedback, and market opportunities (via sales and marketing channels). Having said that, an idea or an innovative concept can come from anyone be it customers, engineering team members, support executives, or sales & marketing folks. Product Managers are responsible for validating the idea from a business angle and see if it fits into the product vision and long term product strategy. They then put the validated idea onto the roadmap and further refine them into product requirements that can be picked up by engineers for development. They uphold the product strategy throughout the product life cycle.
Product Manager is the same as the Project Manager with different title.
This is a common myth especially among those who have heard about product manager roles but do not understand it properly. Mostly it is based on the hear-say that product manager is a project manager in software product organizations. This is not true. Product manager and project Manager are two discrete roles. A project manager is the owner of a project and is responsible for project management activities like Project Planning, Budgeting, Allocating Resources, Managing Timelines, Project Coordination, Project Deliverables, and Stakeholder Reporting. They are usually not responsible for Product or Project Requirements, hence they do not need a domain or product knowledge.
Product Managers, on the contrary, set product vision, define product strategy, manage product requirements throughout the product lifecycle and are responsible for customer development and growing product business. This is a bigger responsibility than just managing the project, which they perhaps also do in certain organizations where they own product delivery as well. We have elaborated this in our article ‘Who is a Product Manager?‘
Product Manager is the same as the Product Owner.
This is a popular misconception as the product manager also plays the role of a product owner in many software product organizations. However, it may be noted that the Product Owner is an agile role and is responsible for defining user stories, driving execution of the stories and, managing product backlog for the scrum team. That is just one aspect of product management: Requirements Management. Product Managers’ role is much more than just ‘Requirements Management’. They are also responsible for Product Strategy and Customer Development.
Product Manager sets the dates and timelines for feature delivery.
This is something most would say is true. But it is also a common misconception about the role of product manager. The product manager cannot decide on the dates and timelines as he is not going to build the product by himself. The engineering team is responsible for product development, hence as a team, they decide on what could be a reasonable estimate based on the complexity of the user story and their capacity. Again this is an estimate, the actuals may vary. So, if there are external commitments that Product Managers have to abide by, then they have to use their requirement prioritization skills to see how can they best deliver a reasonable feature set within the stated deadlines.
So, that was all about a few myths around the role of Product Manager. I hope this article helped in debunking these myths and added more clarity on what product manager is, what they do and what they don’t.
Happy building classy products!
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