What is Product Management?
Everything starts with User Problems.
Everyone in the world faces problems in one form or another. Everything from needing access to clean drinking water to getting bored can be considered a user problem. And to solve these problems, we employ different kinds of products.
Today's capitalistic society is fueled by the motivation to solve user problems. There are companies of 10,000+ employees that are geared toward creating these user-solving products.
But the nature of user problems is such that it changes. The problems change with age, with time, with weather, and with society. And it is due to this nature of user problems, that the products which solve these also need to change along with them.
This is where product management comes into the picture. It is essentially tweaking and managing the lifecycles of these products in response to changing user problems.
So, what do product managers do?
They do the following things:
They understand user problems.
This is done either quantitatively through analyzing data or qualitatively through talking to the users.
They create a list of potential solutions by brainstorming with their team members.
They take inputs from the engineering, UX, marketing and leadership verticles to come up with a list of potential solutions.
They perform a cost analysis to determine which feasible solution will yield the best return.
Considering the impact, cost and business alignment of each potential solution, they define the conditions when a potential solution would be viable to execute.
They convince their team to build it.
Product managers are individual contributors and don't have the authority to order other teams to build the solution they feel should be prioritized. Thus, they convince the development teams to get behind their direction.
They overlook the execution.
They make sure the development teams understand what needs to be done and that the final product/feature resembles the initial vision of the solution.
