If you are an entrepreneur and have or plan to have a tech business then you must be fully aware that in order to do this succesfully on long-term you need at least 5 types of expertise around you. These are:
- Product Managers;
- Product Designers;
- Engineers (mechanical, software, electrical);
- Marketing Managers;
- Sales Managers
Of course some other supporting roles are also needed, depending on how large your portfolio of products is and what’s the type of market you intend to target, but the 5 I’ve just mentioned are the essential building blocks. These people must closely cooperate, as none of them can thrive individually without the support of the other. It only works as a team.
However one of them must be main communication interface with the customer and that’s the task for Product Managers. (often referred as Project Manager, as well).
Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words at some point in their career. Engineers build the products. Product Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good, Marketing people makes sure customers know about the product, sales people get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? What does a Product Manager do?
The answer can be quite large but simply put, no tech company can establish a long-term business without a good Product Manager. Here is why:
The Product Manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.
The confusion about what a product manager is likely stems from the recency of the role. Where practitioners of more established crafts, like design and engineering, have been able to segment themselves by their specialization, product managers are still defining what the role should be. The PM sits at the intersection between business, technology and user experience. So in a simplified description the Product Manager can be named as “the CEO of the product”.
However even if it’s true that product managers indeed do manage the product between all 3 disciplines (business, technology, and UX) and therefore they need to balance all 3 needs and make hard decisions and trade-offs, it’s wrong to think that product managers have some kind of special authority too. Nope, they don’t have that at all. Exactly like the CEO of the company, product managers set the goals, define success, help motivate teams, and are responsible for the outcome. And they must do this with great leadership skills not by any means of authority.
PRODUCT MANAGER RESPONSIBILITIES
Specific responsibilities vary depending on the size of the organization. In larger organizations, for instance, product managers are embedded within teams of specialists. Researchers, analysts, and marketers help gather input, while engineers and designers manage the day-to-day execution, draw up designs, test prototypes, and find bugs. These product managers have more help, but they also spend more time aligning these stakeholders behind a specific vision.
On the flip side, product managers at smaller organizations spend less time getting everyone to agree, but more time doing the hands-on work that comes with defining a vision and seeing it through. Broadly speaking, though, a good product manager will spend his or her time on a handful of tasks. Regardless on which side a PM is ( larger or smaller organization) among her/his main tasks I would metion:
- Understanding and representing user needs;
- Monitoring the market and developing competitive analyses;
- Defining a vision for a product;
- Aligning stakeholders around the vision for the product;
- Prioritizing product features and capabilities;
- Creating a shared brain across larger teams to empower independent decision-making.
COMPANIY PHILOSOPHY ABOUT PMs.
Every company has a different philosophy about the product development process and where PMs fit into that process. From what I observed during my professional journey since 2003, I can say that there are essentially 3 ways most tech companies would describe how they want the Product Managers to do their job. But I argue only one of them leads to success. These are:
1. The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO.
In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEOs admit that this is the model they find themselves in, and it’s not scaling. If you think the product manager job is what’s described in a CERTIFIED SCRUM PRODUCT OWNER class, you almost certainly fall into this category. Mainly if your tech business is focused on developing software/IT products.
2. The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out.
This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, such as those in automotive industry, car OEM’s included (European and American, but not really the Japanese ones), the product manager is really a ROADMAP ADMINISTRATOR.
3. The product manager can do her/his job.
This means exactly what I’ve mentioned above regarding the main resposabilities of a PM. He/She must literally do than.If he can’t then it also in his resposibility to find a way to go through, that’s why is he the Product Manager. This has very much to to with Lean Management approaches.
Now, every company has one of these different philosophy about the product development process and where PMs fit into that process. Me personally I’ve experienced all 3 situations and the 1st and the 2nd case are the most I’ve seen. Unfortunatelly I cannot fully agree with any of these 2 ways, becasue in both cases the result of such product management can generate not more than a mediocre product far to be classified as a top sales product which eventually can contribute to the company’s long term success. Therefore I found the 3rd case to be most effective. However I am not saying that the other 2 are notably bad — it really depends on what type of product you’re building, the company stage, and more. Regardless, when considering a PM role, the philosophy of PM at the company could be the deciding factor on fit for the role.
Yet, the reason which made me conclude that the 3rd case, namely “The product manager can do his job” is the most effective, is because such role requires a strong set of skills and strengths. The reason for calling this out so bluntly is that, in many companies, especially older, enterprise companies, the product manager role has a bad reputation. What too often happens is that the company takes people from other organizational roles-often project management or sometimes business analysts-and they say, “We’re moving to Agile and we don’t need project managers or business analysts anymore, so we need you to be a product manager.”
The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. If the product manager:
- doesn’t have the technology sophistication,
- doesn’t have the business savvy,
- doesn’t have the credibility with the key executives,
- doesn’t have the deep customer knowledge,
- doesn’t have the passion for the product, or
- doesn’t have the respect of their product team,
then it’s a sure recipe for failure.
At one level, the responsibilities of the product manager are pretty straightforward. He or she is responsible for evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built and delivered to customers. We generally describe what needs to get built on the product backlog. Sounds simple enough. And the mechanics of that are not the hard part. What’s hard is to make sure that what goes on the product backlog is worth building. And, today, on the best teams, the engineers and designers want to see some evidence that what you’re asking to build is truly worth building. But if you want to know why the product manager role is considered so important today by CEOs and venture capitalists (VCs), it’s this:
Every business depends on customers. And what customers buy-or choose to use-is your product. The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build.
So, this is why the product manager is the person we hold responsible and accountable for the success of the product. When a product succeeds, it’s because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it’s the product manager’s fault. You can start to see now why this role is a proving ground for future CEOs and why the best VCs only want to invest in a company that has one of these proven product people as one of the co-founders.
Computer Aided Design & The 118 Elements 
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