About me: After 9 years of design career, from being a Graphic Designer to UI/UX Designer to Design Lead, I chose to become a Product Manager. Currently I am working as Product Manager and Design Lead for JioWorks (A project management tool).

The Why: After years of self-learning about Product Management and after a year of working as a Product Manager, I have decided to write about Product Management in a very practical way. While I was on the journey of becoming a Product Manager, there were lot of question in my mind and it was difficult to find the practical answer without actually working as a Product Manager, the questions are listed below and I believe all aspirants of Product Management have these same set of questions in their mind.

• What does a Product Manager do?

• What kind of skills a Product Manager should have?

• Does a Product Manager need to know about Sales and Marketing?

• Does a Product Manager need to know about Design and Engineering?

• What is Design Thinking and how does it apply practically?

• What is the best framework for Product Management?

• What is a Product vision and how to create one?

• What is a Product Strategy and how to create one?

• How to define features for the Product and how to prioritize them?

• How to create a roadmap, practically?

• How to do research?

• What is Agile or Scrum or Kanban?

The How: Product Management is huge topic and cannot be explained in a blog or couple of blogs therefore I have planned to publish a blog every Saturday for next couple of months covering all the above questions as well as all other important aspects of it. So, keep in touch, follow me on LinkedIn or on Twitter to get the latest updates about the blogs.

What is Product Management?

Product Management is growing exponentially and there is a huge demand for Product Managers. But what exactly is Product Management, that’s what I am going to explain in this post.

Let’s understand by breaking Product and Management individually.

What is Product?

A Product is the vehicle through which businesses deliver values to its customers, now this vehicle can exist in physical or in digital form, or it can be a goods or a service. In both the cases, it must deliver a value. For example, a shoe especially designed for sprinters made by an athlete shoe company. The shoe is light weight, comfortable, size can be customized as per the sprinter foot size and with good build quality. Now this shoe company is delivering value (such as perfectly fitted shoe, light weight and durable) to the sprinters via the product i.e., the shoe. Likewise for digital form, example we have lots of ticket booking app (for movies, flights, buses and others) which provides values such as, customers can book tickets while on the go and customer can be assure that they are getting the best price available in the market.

If there is no value, there is no product. The product must possess the values and the values must be align with what the customer’s needs is. We will talk about customer needs and wants, problems and solutions in later blogs. For now, let just digest it, a product must have a value to deliver.

What is Management?

Now let’s understand what Management means, Management means directing and leading a group of people or an organization to reach a common goal. The common goal here can be, achieving the vision of the organization or it can be increasing the revenue by certain percent, or it can be to acquire certain number of customers, or it can be creating a vehicle (product) to deliver the values to customers.

So altogether Product Management means driving a group of people to create the vehicle (Product) through which the business can deliver values to its customers. Product Management as a process start with the initial idea of the product or a feature and continues till the end-life of it.

Product Management is the intersection between Design, Technology and Business. It validates whether the feature or the product (as a whole), is viable, useable, valuable and feasible. If the feature or the product fails in any of these parameters, it needs to be dropped from the plan immediately.

What is Product Manager?

Product Manager identifies the customer and the business needs that a product or a feature will fulfil. They facilitate the process of Product Management on a day-to-day basis. Product Managers owns the product and drives the Product Team toward the vision of the product.

What are the Roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager?

1. Defines the Vision of the Product

2. Creates Strategies to achieve the Vision

3. Creates Roadmaps (Roadmaps is a tool to explain what is being delivered and by when?

4. Constantly be in touch with the customers to understand their needs and act as customer’s voice

5. Works closely with the Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support to ensure business goals and customer needs are met.

6. Prioritizes what needs to be build

7. Keeps a close eye on the market trends, customer behavior and competitions

What Skills are required to be a Product Manager?

1. Communication: The most important skill a product manager should have, is communication skill. Product Managers constantly communicate with Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support Teams and other stakeholders, so it is foremost important that he/she can convey the message in a very clear and comprehensive way.

2. Product Sense: It is the ability to understand why a product or a feature would work or wouldn’t work. Product sense is the combination of 3 qualities; 1. Cognitive Empathy, 2. Creativity and 3. Domain Knowledge.

3. Analytical Skills: It is the ability to analyze data to provide actionable insights.

4. Design: Product Manager don’t have to design the UI but the understanding of the design process and the ability to differentiate between a bad design and a good design will help in making decision as well as help communicating with the designer in their own languages.

5. Understanding of Technology: It doesn’t mean that he/she have to code but the high-level understanding of technology will help in making decisions as well as help in communicating with the engineers in their own languages.

6. Ability to conduct research systematically: There are different kind of research a Product Manager does, such as customer research, market research, experimentation etc. The ability to conduct research in a systematically way will help the product manager saves a lot of time.

Please Note: The roles, responsibilities and the skillsets listed above are not the comprehensive but are the most important ones.

Next Week Topic: What is a Product Vision and how to create one?

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