Product Manager is an attractive, relatively new, and exciting position! But to make the right choice, let's try to understand what underlies this profession, whether it is necessary to be a techie, where the profession started, and where it goes.
Is there a place for a PM?
There are developers and designers responsible for the assembly and the visual appearance of an IT product. There are market people who research the market. There are financial officers responsible for accounting and cash flows. Process managers are responsible for coordinating tasks within teams and specific processes' deadlines. There are founders, people who have a vision and business competencies. All roles are divided, or so it seems. Why and how did product managers appear?
The origins
The history of PM as a profession traces back to the year 1931. Around that time, P&G started to think about researching their consumers. They decided to hire a staff of employees who will study customers' experience in the field. The idea turned out to be successful, and Neil McElroy described the new position as a brand man, a brand manager, responsible not only for the research and marketing but also for coordinating the sales process, personally accountable for studying the interaction between clients and the product and influences the development of the latter.
Intuit paved the way for brand management for IT companies. The company was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook (ex-P&G Brandman) and Tom Proulx. Quicken was one of the Intuit products, financial accounting for housewives. Developers ensured that the program interface was as straightforward as possible. They tried to understand how a housewife sees accounting. As a result, they imitated the appearance and location of a traditional physical checkbook on the screen. It was their way to stand out.
Since the 1990s, technology companies have been paying attention not only to the technical part but also to the usability and product value. Largest IT companies started to hire program managers who translate user wishes into technical requirements for engineers.
The market continues to evolve, and no one doubts the need for a client-centric approach to IT products. The Association of International Product Marketing & Management (AIPMM) was established in 1998. It promotes education in product management worldwide. The Agile Manifesto was introduced in 2001, increasing the demand for product management in product development. In 2002, Google launched Associate Product Manager (APM), the first program soon adopted by technology companies worldwide, which pursued the sole goal of educating the next generation of product leaders.
PM today
A product manager is a person primarily responsible for maximizing the product's value to users. This is a human connection between the product and the user. PM works by identifying the needs and desires of the user and product consumption scenarios and constantly tries to improve the experience of using the product. A product manager communicates between the teams responsible for product implementation and users. The PM ensures that the product complies with the user's needs and that it was not created just for the sake of it. At the same time, a PM must be able to translate user requests into a technical language understandable to fellow developers, designers, and analysts. To ensure that everyone who creates the product acts smoothly, achieves the goals, and implements the product vision.
What should a product manager know to do?
The PM role may include various functions depending on the company and team organization. We can identify the main tasks for almost every PM:
Find the target audience for the product;
Conduct user experience research using multiple tools: interviews, surveys, and others;
Based on the received feedback, formulate requirements for the development and improvement of the product;
Work with product metrics. Predict and monitor the product growth based on data;
Shape a product vision, common goals, and objectives of the product on the market in the medium and long term;
Understand the financial side of the product — understand the launch costs, market launch costs, and the payback period;
Plan a product development roadmap and have a general plan for the month/quarter/six months, with the product vision and team resources in mind;
Work with the backlog — build a step-by-step plan for implementing features considering product metrics, business objectives, and development opportunities. Collect ideas, put forward and prioritize hypotheses;
Good teamwork skills, proper collaboration, and interaction with stakeholders.
Other important skills:
Be able to prototype the basics and give comments to the design team;
Be able to talk to the technical director and give predictions for the timing of development;
Be able to make presentations and stand up for your ideas;
Know how marketing works and understand the channels for attracting users.
Product manager and other specialists in the team
A product manager is a process coordinator. The product manager does not supervise marketers, developers, designers, and analysts. They have their team leads, who distribute the load and monitor the quality. The task of a product manager, as a conductor, is to ensure that all departments work smoothly concerning the product and that the product is in line with what users expect.
In different companies and teams, the PM functions may change and overlap with the job responsibilities of others.
Possible intersection with other responsibilities:
Due to the different focus of PM's nature in companies, there are new PM-related positions, for example:
A Technical Product Manager is a product manager with a solid technical background who focuses on the more technical aspects of the product. A technical manager is in closer contact with the engineering team than with the business, sales, and marketing departments;
A Product Marketing Manager is a specialist with a focus on the marketing component who can influence the product;
A Product Operations Manager is a mini CEO, closer to the Operations Director;
Data Product Manager is a PM with a focus on the Data-Driven approach. Greater emphasis on analytics and strong analytical skills;
Growth Product Manager – the focus of such a PM is shifted toward rapid product growth. They check and test a lot of hypotheses in a quick search of new traffic sources to scale;
A Product Design Manager, as a rule, grows out of product designers whose responsibilities have expanded from creating on-request interfaces to UX research, shaping and implementing product hypotheses, and independently influencing the product.
You can come to the PM profession from almost any related specialty if you want to. The main thing is to choose a company that craves a particular type of PM. And, of course, to find a product that will drive you so that you have the desire and strength to improve it through working with users.
Conclusion
PM is a role that evolved from the marketing field, having started as brand management;
Tech companies realized that a customer-centric approach is also essential for their products;
The main task of PM is to maximize the product value for users through feedback;
Product metrics are an effective tool for evaluating PM performance. They must grow;
PM works at the intersection of marketing, analytics, and project management. The PM also interacts with the technical team and stakeholders;
Depending on the company and the team structure, the requirements for PM skills may vary. But the unchanging essence is the improvement of the product for users. Therefore, there are several types of PM.