Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ensuring that a product meets the needs of its target market and contributes to the business strategy, while managing a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Software product management adapts the fundamentals of product management for digital products.
History
The concept of product management originates from a 1931 memo by Procter & Gamble President Neil H. McElroy. McElroy, requesting additional employees focused on brand management, needed “Brand Men” who would take on the role of managing products, packaging, positioning, distribution, and sales performance.
The memo defined a Brand Man’s work as:
- Study carefully shipments of his brands by units.
- Where brand development is heavy … examine carefully the combination of effort that seems to be clicking, and try to apply this same treatment to other territories.
- Where brand development is light:
- Study the advertising and promotion history of the brand.
- After uncovering our weakness, develop a plan that can be applied to this local sore spot.
- Outline this plan in detail to the division manager.
- Prepare sales helps and all other necessary material for carrying out the plan.
- Keep whatever records are necessary and make whatever field studies are necessary to determine whether the plan has produced the expected results.
- Take full responsibility … for the general printed word plans for his brands.
- Take full responsibility for all other advertising expenditures.
- Experiment with and recommend wrapper revisions.
- See District Manager a number of times a year to discuss with him any possible faults in our promotion plans for that territory.
In modern terms, McElroy defined the role as: analyze product distribution, optimize working distribution strategies, diagnose and solve distribution issues, optimize product positioning and product marketing, and collaborate with regional distribution managers.
Role of Product Managers
Product managers are responsible for managing a company’s product line on a day-to-day basis. As a result, product managers are critical in both driving a company’s growth, margins, and revenue. They are responsible for the business case, conceptualizing, planning, product development, product marketing, and delivering products to their target market. Depending on the company size, industry, and history, product management has a variety of functions and roles. Frequently there is an Income statement (or Profit and Loss) responsibility as a key metric for evaluating product manager performance.
Tasks
Product managers analyze information including customer research, competitive intelligence, industry analysis, trends, economic signals, and competitive activity, as well as documenting requirements, setting product strategy, and creating the road map. Product managers align across departments within their company including product design and development, marketing, sales, customer support, and legal.
Product manager
A product manager (PM) is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the product strategy behind a product (physical or digital), specify its functional requirements, and manage feature releases. Product managers coordinate work done by many other functions (like software engineers, data scientists, and product designers), and are ultimately responsible for product outcomes. Product managers traditionally resided in the marketing organizations of technology companies, but have since additionally become staples of engineering and even product-specific teams.
Definition
A product manager considers numerous factors such as intended customer or user of a product, the products offered by the competition, and how well the product fits with the company’s business model. The scope of a product manager varies greatly, some may manage one or more product lines and others (especially in large companies) may manage small components or features of a product.
In the financial services industry (banking, insurance etc.), product managers manage financial products (for example, credit card portfolios), their profit and loss, and also determine the business development strategy.
The term is often confused with other similar roles, such as:
- Project manager: may perform all activities related to schedule and resource management
- Program Manager, sometimes known as Technical Program Manager (TPM): may perform activities related to schedule, resource, and cross-functional execution
- Product owner: a popular role in Agile development methodology, may perform all activities related to a self-encapsulated feature or feature set plan, development and releases
- Product marketing manager: responsible for the outbound marketing activities of the product, not development and cross-functional execution
Product management in software development
The role of the product manager was originally created to manage the complexity of the product lines of a business, as well as to ensure that those products were profitable. Product managers can come from many different backgrounds, because their primary skills involve working well with customers and understanding the problems the product is intended to solve.
A product manager is responsible for orchestrating the various activities associated with ensuring that a product is delivered that meets users’ needs. A software product manager’s role varies as the software moves through its lifecycle; earlier in the development process the product manager meets the intended audience of the product to engage in requirements elicitation, whereas later in the lifecycle the product manager’s primary focus may be in acceptance testing of the product. Throughout all the stages of the product development process, the product manager represents the needs of end-users, evaluates market trends and competition, and uses this information to determine what features to build. For example, a product manager may decide a feature is needed because users are asking for it, or because the feature is needed to stay competitive. In order to facilitate this decision-making process the product manager may set out a vision for the product or a general framework for making product decisions. The product manager also ensures an atmosphere of cohesiveness and focused collaboration between all the members of the team, all in the interest of driving the product forward. Product managers are often thought of as sitting at the intersection of business, design, and technology.
Product owner in software development
Within an agile software development environment, product delivery responsibilities are taken on by a product owner, a project role that can be performed by a product or engineering manager to ensure successful implementation of tactical plans and requirements during the development stage of a product. While the product manager has a strategic and long-term perspective with a strong focus on the market success of a product, a product owner aims to maximize the business value of the product or increment created by an agile project which can include benefits within an organization and does not explicitly relate to a product’s marketability. Therefore, a product owner focuses mainly on the development of a product and may limit their product owner responsibilities to the duration of a project. The product manager role, in contrast, requires a long-term perspective of the market and product line.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a product owner within an agile project include creating and prioritizing the product backlog, which is a list of things to be done by the development team, in order to maximize the business value created by the project. The product backlog is made up of user stories which are brief narrative descriptions of what a feature should do, including a checklist of items that are required to be in place in order for the feature to be considered done, called the acceptance criteria. The details of how the feature is developed are worked out by developers and designers. At the end of the development sprint, the product owner is responsible for verifying that the acceptance criteria have been met; only then is the work on the feature officially done.
Product manager career progression
Product managers often start their careers as engineers or specialists in other functions and eventually transition to product management. Product managers undergo a structured interview process, often a mix of case-based product strategy interviews, analytical interviews, and more traditional behavioral interviews. Increasingly, large technology companies are hiring and training young graduates directly through programs like the Google Associate Product Manager program or the Facebook Rotational Product Manager program.
Individual contributor product managers have no direct reports: they “lead through influence” in a cross-functional product team. As individuals grow in seniority, they eventually take on managing other PMs, under titles like Group Product Manager, Product Lead or Product Director. The Chief Product Officer (sometimes known as Head of Product or VP Product) is responsible for all product-related matters, including strategy, alignment, hiring, and management.
Because of the broad responsibilities, product management is often seen as a training ground to C-level leadership roles in technology companies.
