About a month ago, I published an article on “What Product Management is not” to shed more light on how people misapprehend the product management function among a sea of similar roles. But that misapprehension doesn’t end there still.
But first, some keywords:
Product management is a craft that enables teams to plan, design, and continuously bring better products to market
Some describe the Product Manager as the CEO of a product but I will describe it as someone who enables and empower the rest of the team to bring their strong competencies in design, marketing and development. Hence, see below different facets of product management that should not be taken as the entirety of what the practice entails.
Product Management is not JUST …
Product Design
A Product Designer is heavily involved in doing user research, create design strategies, create experiences and design artifacts for a product
What prevails & Best Practice – Organizations have UI/UX designers that create experiences and design product artifacts. Most rely on the Product Manager to do user research. While that is not bad, the designer should actually be very involved in the user research and user research should go beyond requirements gathers – it should involve empathizing with them and feeling how they currently address those.
In some cases, the Product Manager also acts as the Product Designer, which is totally ok if they can. However, if they cannot, it is advised that the Product Manager has some basic experience and passion for well-designed products.
Product Development
Product development is only a subset of the lifecycle of a product that is focused on building features and maintaining the software. Product managers are responsible for leading an idea to launch, focusing on features, business value, and the customer.
What prevails & Best Practice – Some organization do have an Engineering/Technical Lead works closely to with the Product Manager to prioritize, decide and agree on features to build; while the Engineering / Technical Lead focuses on delivering good quality software, the Product Manager focuses on the other aspects of product management. In some organizations, the Product Manager acts as in the capacity of the Engineering Lead – that is totally ok, depending on the sale of the product and given the available skillsets
Product Marketing
Product Marketing is also a subset of the lifecycle of a product that focuses on promoting and selling a product to a customer with the best possible product service experience, in a manner such that it enables them to accelerate themselves through their purchasing process. Note that the Product Manager does not sell the product, but (s)he is involved in the process of designing the appropriate product-service-experience that helps the user walk through the discovery, decision and eventual purchase process by themselves.
What prevails & Best Practice – Some organizations leverage their existing sales team to work with product managers to execute their product sales strategy. While some organizations set sales targets for Product Managers to figure out how to sell their product and met sales targets.
Overall, since product management is a growing practice (some say it’s an art, some say it’s a science, I say it’s both), the background and prior experience of a Product Manager goes a long way in determining which aspect of the product lifecycle they are best at or more inclined towards – A Product Manager with a background in interface and experience design will most likely lean more towards product design and product design practices, while a prior developer, maybe spending more time with the development team and getting into a discussion with the DevOps team. Overall, I say all these aspects are interwoven and should be learnt all together and brought to practice where necessary or where specialization is required.
Concluding on these series, I would advise the following:
- find your sweet spot within the practice
- Do it ever so carefully so you do overstep into the roles of other team members because your role may be misconstrued as something else and also ensure that balls of tasks do not drop, where you were expected to pick them up.
- And at every point in time, enlighten people about what your role entails.
- Bonus point – Always learn, always evolve and always practice!
Wanna know more? Wanna explore together? Pls reach out and we could be on our way to making the best partnerships!
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