Who is a Product Manager?
As we discussed in our last article What is Product Management?, the Product Manager is the one who tries to help the organization solve problems that are outstanding in the market. They do that by doing a problem validation from the business viability point of view. And, then they work on to build a product and liaison with different stakeholders of the company to ship the product. Post that, it continuously engages with the customer, understands their needs and market requirements and then work upon to improve that product for better customer experience and greater customer adoption.
Thus, simply put: “A Product Manager is the one who is responsible for building and maintaining the product throughout its lifecycle.” He is responsible for building the product, maintaining it, scaling it and growing the product business throughout the entire lifecycle of the product.
A Product Manager in an organization is responsible for,
Setting up a compelling PRODUCT VISION, a stable and long-term one, which shows the big picture of how the product can translate the ‘Problem space’ to ‘Solution space.’
Formulating a great PRODUCT STRATEGY, which illustrates how this vision is going to be achieved by the product organization.
Leading the PRODUCT DESIGN & EXECUTION, which is all about getting things done. This is the most challenging aspect of product management as it needs collaboration from multiple teams, right from User experience to Engineering to Technical Writing to Sales, Marketing and Ops. It demands the product manager to be communicative and persuasive to push that needle to make all-stars align so that the product can be shipped and monetized.
Driving the CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT initiatives, to achieve the product-market fit and then putting up a customer acquisition process in place for growing the customer base and increasing the adoption of the product.
A Product manager plays a different set of roles in different phases of the product life-cycle. In the product discovery phase, the product manager plays the role of ‘Product Designer’, where they closely work with the user experience designers and domain experts (of the problem area) to conceptualize the product, define the product requirements and translate it to a product prototype.
In the development phase, they work closely with the engineering team as a program manager to provide them guidance and direction on building the product. They help the engineering team in release planning, owning and managing the product backlog, scoping the user stories, guiding the team on prioritization and finally accepting them for the product release.
During the product introduction phase, one of the challenging aspects of the product manager is to prepare a go-to-market strategy for the product and acquire the first few customers. The product manager plays the role of subject matter expert in this phase for the rest of the organization and the early adopters of the product. They are responsible for evangelizing the product, creating awareness about the product and its problem space, and the benefits that it brings to the table. Product managers work closely with the first few customers, especially those who are recruited as part of a beta or early adopter program, to test the minimum viable product. This helps in identifying the product delta and getting the feedback early into the product to improve it further and achieve the product-market fit.
Once the product-market fit is achieved, in the growth phase, the product manager plays the role of a growth hacker to aggressively acquire customers, increase the adoption of the product and scale the customer base. They work closely with the growth marketers to define customer journeys, identify problem areas and then do rapid experimentation to accelerate the growth.
In the maturity phase, the product manager plays the role of a business strategist. The idea is to focus more on the business aspects of the product by retaining the customer base, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing the churn rate and sustaining the market share. Focus areas in this phase are to work on a competitive pricing strategy, market expansion, evolving the product with new use cases and added value proposition. This is the phase where product managers battle with technology debts and find it difficult to innovate. So, they look for strategies to add other channels of monetization like exposing APIs as a service, adding integration partners who have innovative solutions in the same space, etc. In parallel, they also look for other avenues to innovate with platform re-architecting or building a contemporary product from scratch or acquiring a product and integrating it with the existing product offering. These strategies can help defer the decline phase and in some case might also renew the entire product lifecycle. If none of these strategies work and the product enters into the decline phase, then product managers also take the hard decisions to deprecate certain features of the product which are obsolete and adding to the overhead cost or might decide on phasing it out altogether.
The role of a product manager does vary a bit from company to company depending on the company’s culture and focus area. Software product organizations are typically either Sales-focused or Engineering-focused or Market-focused. In each of these cases, the role of product management organization varies a lot.
Sales-Focused: As the name suggests, in a sales-focused organization, more focus is on the sales numbers and maximizing the return on investment on the product. Product management, in this case, is more focused on enabling sales and marketing by acting as a product marketing organization. They create sales enablement artefacts like product factsheets, battle cards, case studies, etc. Also, as they are also responsible to build and maintaining the product, they do act as a program manager for the engineering organization providing them guidance on product requirements. Product Leaders in a sales-focused organization own the P&L responsibilities and ensure they meet their revenue KPIs. Hence product priorities are decided in a top-down manner, with product leaders defining their objectives and objectives of that of their product teams.
Engineering-Focused: Engineering-focused organization is more invested in technology and innovation. They love experimenting and adopting new technologies. So, they need a strong technical product manager who can closely work with them to understand customer needs, translate them into product requirements and then drive execution.
Market-Focused: Market-focused organizations are more invested in customer needs and are obsessed with solving customer problems. Product managers are very proactive, data-driven and result-oriented. Hence product management is more strategic and has a market-centric & customer-focused approach. So, product priorities are bottom-up in this case with each product manager setting goals and objectives for their teams based on the market requirements and product leadership guides the same.
So, that was all about Product Managers and their role in different organizations. In our coming articles, we will further explore this space, bust a few myths and build on the knowledge. Hope you found this information useful.
Happy building classy products!
P.S: Learn more on the Product Management concepts, processes, and strategies from my free videos on Antwak.
More readings and references:
https://www.mindtheproduct.com/what-exactly-is-a-product-manager/
Cagan, Marty (2018). Inspired: How to create tech products customers love (2nd ed.). Wiley India
https://www.productplan.com/product-management-role-product-lifecycle/