Product management

Product management is concerned with managing products’ lifecycle: creating, maintaining, improving, and liquidating them, to the benefit of and value creation for concerned stakeholders: shareholders of the enterprise, clients, employees, and environment. Management functions in product management include planning, organizing, execution, control, and feedback analysis at every stage of product’s lifecycle by establishing specific protocols (practices, tools and metrics, roles and bodies).

Product management practices

On a higher level product management practices include:

  • Define your business model
  • Understand your clients
  • Define the product
  • Develop and launch the product
  • Grow and support the product

On a more detailed level product management activities include:

  • Define your business model
  • Understand your clients
    • Identify your market
    • Identify the customers and users
    • Identify the clients’ concerns
      • Give them time to address their opinions and views on the issue
      • Take notes
      • Dig deeper
      • Ask for more information
      • Get to know what they are currently doing
      • Seek for the root causes and pains
      • Find the true and deep problem
    • Understand competing products
      • What problems are they solving
      • Are they solving the same problem
      • Are they solving the right problem they are destined to solve
      • Are they solving the right problem in the most efficient way
    • Capture formal requirements
  • Define the product
    • Create a vision for the product
      • Write a future press-release / launch blog post about product
      • State value proposition
      • Identify Core Use Case
    • Architect the product
      • Product lifecycle map
      • Feature structure / map
    • Chart the product roadmap
    • Define quality
  • Develop and launch the product
    • Set up product development and operations
      • Gather resources
        • Build the team
        • Arrange budget
      • Commit to deadlines
        • Layered releases
      • Model and refine the product
        • Create customer / user journeys maps
        • Design the product
        • Prioritize features
        • Prototype the product
        • Perform usability testing
        • Perform quality assurance
      • Go live
        • Product launch
          • Criteria for launch readiness
        • Product distribution
        • Product sales
        • Collect users’ feedback
      • Grow and support the product

Common pitfalls in product management and of product manager

Define your business model

  • Failing to define reasons for success
  • Failing to formulate own definition of and content for product lifecycle
  • Failing to formulate own definition and content for product management
  • Confusing good product with a good business model
  • Having conflicting agendas for product management
  • Playing roles other than are needed

Understand your customer

  • Failing to ask questions
  • Skipping communications with clients on every stage of product delivery
  • Failing to align with the customer on common areas for interaction
  • Failing to understand who customers and users of the product are
  • Failing to understanding user’s objectives beyond the product
  • Confusing customer requirements with product requirements
  • Confusing product team with the customer
  • Confusing customer with the user
  • Confusing features with benefits
  • Confusing emotional features with unimportant features
  • Taking user problems at face value without recognizing true pains behind the request
  • Taking the development / solution path advised by the user
  • Formulating customer’s problems instead of them
  • Speaking for the / instead of the customer
  • Failing to formulate a thorough understanding of user’s product-free course of action
  • Saying yes to all requests / lack of ability and power to say no to nonessential features
  • Ignoring customer feedback
  • Skipping a thorough understanding of a problem and reaching for a solution
  • Failing to draw a line in gathering requirements and start developing the product

Develop the product

  • Forgetting the core problem
  • Making false / naive assumptions about customer behavior
  • Digging into the planning
  • Performing trivial tasks
  • Being a project manager
  • Failing to assemble right people for the team
  • Being constrained by the product team
  • Withholding the information from the product team
  • Starting development without shared understanding of the product and the process
  • Failing to sync performance culture within the team
  • Communicating within the team only without considering a larger community
  • Focusing on the right process rather the right outcome
  • Sticking to the same work practices
  • Spending too much time on polishing work practices
  • Following the latest management practices
  • Spending too much time on using workload management tools
  • Spending too much time in meetings
  • Confusing innovation with value
  • Following the latest tech trends
  • Being emotional about the product
  • Attacking the problem indirectly
  • Developing not the most valuable features
  • Making the product overly perfect
  • Making the product overly complex
  • Adding features for their own sake
  • Addressing features that are not client-centric and are introduced by the product manager / product team
  • Addressing features that are of no need / use to the clients
  • Keeping useless and not working features
  • Trying to overly polish the product
  • Delivering product releases in too large chunks
  • Creating products for their own sake since they can be created
  • Skipping usability testing
  • Performing tests lately and / or rarely

Launch the product

  • Failing to plan and pilot a launch
  • Shipping with disgusting visual design

Grow and support the product

  • Confusing improving functionality with improving product

 

Product manager

Product management is performed by the product manager, an occupation best described by what one does, what one is not, and what helps one to excel rather that having a strict and dry definition.

Key product manager’s activities

  • Product management practices
  • Stakeholders (expectations) management
  • Product team leadership
  • Company objectives and product vision compliance
  • Key decisions coordination and documentation
  • Consensus development
  • Feedback collection
  • Scope management and progress maintenance
  • Troubleshooting and problem solving
  • Measuring development progress and product usage

What product manager is not

  • A product’s CEO
  • A key user / customer
  • A marketing, development, operations, sales or any other functional type manager
  • A business developer
  • A project manager
  • A developer
  • A designer
  • A product team manager

Key product manager’s traits

  • Performance mindset
  • Personal virtues
  • Excellent skills
  • Domain expertise

Key product manager’s qualities of mindset

  • Growth
  • Holistic
  • Big-picture
  • Essential
  • Analytical
  • Reflecting
  • Practical
  • Value-driven

Key product manager’s personal virtues

  • Agility
  • Focus
  • Energy
  • Passion
  • Confidence
  • Grit
  • Persistence
  • Humility
  • Integrity

Key product manager’s skills

  • Communication skills
    • Interviewing
    • Collecting feedback
    • Storytelling
    • Presentation
    • Negotiation
    • Persuasion
    • Influence
    • Selling
    • Conflict resolution
  • Business acumen
    • Searching for opportunities
    • Separating good products from bad and mediocre
  • Strategy
  • Data analytics
  • Finance
    • Valuation
    • Unit-economics
    • Budgeting and cost estimation
  • Management
    • Decision making
    • Planning
    • Prioritization
    • Coordination
    • Organization
    • Control
    • Performance measurement
  • Creative process
    • Design thinking
    • Critical thinking

Key product manager’s expertise

  • Business
  • UX and design
  • Tech
  • Troubleshooting