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What is a Product Manager?

 Wikipedia says:

Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.

 

What does that mean? Essentially it means defining the vision of a product, setting up a roadmap to get there, working with stakeholders to keep the development on track and on time (usually working with a Project Manager) and planning for the next iteration of the product or the sunset of it and the next new product to take its place.

 

First a PdM needs to work with the executive staff and see what is wanted. What do they have, where do they want to go with it. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they have a basic 'executive overview' vision of what they want to make/ do. A PdM's job is to take that kernel and do some research, a lot of it really. Research on the product, the market, the customers. Is this a road already travelled? Is this a new innovation, going where no one has gone before?

 

For existing products, like a mobile app for gathering stock quotes, or an aggregate news reader, or a video game…there are others out there already. What did they do? What does the market for those products look like? What are they selling it for? How much are they making it for? There are tons of questions to ask because those are the questions you need to answer in order to crystalize that vision in to a product.

 

For new products, that gets a lot harder. You often don't know the questions, but you go hunting for them anyhow. How do we get from Point A (an idea) to Point B (a viable product)?

 

Functionally as a PdM I'd assemble a basic, 'executive overview' for the top levels of management. A feasibility study. Basic numbers on the market and customers, and a list of all the applicable touchpoints as we know it at the time. From this we can get an idea of the cost:

 

"We'll need one C+ coder, a .Net guy, a couple QA guys, a graphic designer/ web guy, a PM and a PdM. It'll take approximately X weeks to do the initial code, Y weeks to QA, and Z to do bug fixes before we can release the first iteration of the product. That costs ~250k from start to finish for Phase One."

 

From there, once we have approval I'd work with the stakeholders to nail down a requirements document, with user stories so the developers can get to work. The requirements/ user stories are for the QA team too, that's what they test to. Keep this loose if at all possible. More focus on user stories, less focus on the requirements verbiage. Work with stakeholders on mockups.

 

A product manager works with a lot of groups. Every team that has a hand in the product usually will know the Product Manager. The PdM attends a lot of meetings, standups, and chats with team members in the hallways. He's the guy who knows the VISION. I can't express how important it is to develop relationships with all the teams involved. Ideally whenever they have questions, they'd loop you in (instead of having varied teams going off on their own based on assumptions).

 

In past lives we've had a dedicated team who handled marketing. The PdM didn't handle marketing, but worked closely with them. I know in some organizations the PdM wears the marketing hat more often.

 

Also, I'm used to having a Project Manager to​​ work with versus doing the PM work as well. The PM and PdM work very closely. Think of the PdM as the strategist and the PM as the tactician. The PdM identifies all the touchpoints for a product to get developed and has the vision, but it's the Project Manager who really makes up the schedule and lines up all the work to get done in nice neat little pipelines.

 

To be fair, an Agile approach tends to work best for Product Management versus Waterfall as the latter tends to be very slow moving, inflexible and Product Lifecycles tend to be rapidly-changing environments, most especially in software. The market changes so fast that if we are required to go back to a solid Product Requirements Document for every change, we'll be waiting a lifetime for the docs to be edited, and development to be re-started, we'll end up chasing our tails in a mire of bureaucratic BS when we should be getting a product out the door and revise in the next iteration.

 

One of the problems with developing any product is that the marketplace and customer landscape is constantly changing. Often by the time a product hits the market, things have changed and the product isn't as relevant as it could have been, or as it was when development first started.

 

Case in point, the MMORPG market. When Star Wars: The Old Republic was started the norm was for games to have subscriptions. By the time the game was released all the top-tier games were Free To Play, with Microtransactions AND a subscription for premium play. Needless to say when the market has so many games already, free to play, it's a hard sell to get people to pay up front for your game, even Star Wars. Subscription numbers never hit their marks and SWTOR went Free To Play w/ Microtransactions within a year. In the process the company took a massive hit and reduced their staffing by over half.

 

So as a product manager we need to keep a constant eye on the market. It's a moving target.

 

Another part of being a PdM is to look forward. It's not just about getting a product to market but to keeping it fresh, valid, relevant in today's market. Technology changes. Today it is an iPhone 5 but the iPhone 6 will be out shortly, a new OS, a new gadget, a new way of doing things. Is your product going to be ready for the Xbox One/ PS4?

 

Can your existing product reasonably compete? Is it time to sunset it and develop a new model?

 

It's a never-ending cycle of questions we ask, that we need to stay on top of.

 

So what is a Product Manager?

It's a person who asks a lot of questions and gets a lot of answers about the product you want to make and the environment/ market you want to release it in. They find all the moving parts and identify them and build relationships with all stakeholders. They are part of a team that helps get your idea in to the market and helps keep it there, working for you.

 

-Shannan De Witt, FLEX CEO