What Is Product Management?
In the past few decades, product management has emerged as a critical role for any organization building products or experiences. The day-to-day work of product management varies widely from organization to organization, but the mandate for product managers is consistent: to connect and align internal stakeholders around the goals of your business, and to make sure that those goals are aligned with the needs of your customers.
As illustrated in Figure 1-1, this often means working with the designers and developers charged with actually building and maintaining a product as well as any other stakeholders (such as business analysts) working on that particular product team. Depending on the specifics of the organization and the product, a product manager might oversee the roadmap for their specific product, conduct research to understand the competitive landscape, and manage the day-to-day workings of the product team using an Agile process such as Scrum or XP.
Figure 1-1. Product management sitting between business, design, and technology
A product manager’s connective responsibilities also extend beyond their immediate product team. As illustrated in Figure 1-2, product managers must also connect and align between their team and other product teams as well as the executives who generally set the organization’s strategy and vision. They must also work closely with any other parts of the organization responsible for bringing products to market, such as sales and marketing.
Figure 1-2. Product management connecting stakeholders beyond the immediate product team
Finally, a product manager must connect and align all of their organization’s internal stakeholders with the needs and goals of its customers or users. In some organizations, this means conducting user research directly. In other organizations, it might mean working closely with customer-facing counterparts in sales or customer service.
Product Managers Connect the “What” and the “Why”
For organizations seeking simply to increase or accelerate the output of their product teams, the value of product management is not always entirely clear. More developers write more code. More designers can unblock those developers to get products to market faster. What exactly can a bunch of product managers do?
The answer is not so much about the speed at which product teams create outputs, but rather the outcomes of the products they create. Product managers make sure that the “what” being built is aligned with the “why”s provided by users and by the organization itself—and then work with their teams to figure out “how” best to build it. In doing so, product managers set up the products on which they work for success in real-world markets with real-world customers.
As modern organizations strive to work faster and harder, it is more important than ever to have somebody on a product team asking “why,” and measuring success in terms of outcomes, not outputs. Product management provides this critical voice and helps teams work smarter.
Setting Up Product Managers for Success
The impact of a successful product management practice is often underestimated, especially by organizations that see product management as a purely tactical or functionary role. In fact, given the fairly large variance in the day-to-day work of product management, many organizations seek to define the roles of individual product managers as tightly and narrowly as possible to avoid ambiguity.
But product management works best when it is given room to extend and connect. Seasoned product managers know to expect some ambiguity from their role, and proactively seek out opportunities to break down organizational silos and make new connections. As an organizational leader, your job is not to provide absolute clarity about their day-to-day work, but rather about their mandate: do whatever it takes to connect and align the whole organization around the voice of our customers.