This article is one of simple necessity. One of the most common questions that I receive deals with misconceptions about what the role of a product manager is and how it relates to the product management and product development processes. While these two disciplines are inextricably related they are also fundamentally different and shouldn’t be confused or overlap. Here’s the crash course version of what you need to know about each.
Product Management Styles
In every company different approaches to product management come into play, each chosen based on the organization’s objectives. For instance, a product management team centered on customers would excel in identifying customer requirements and issues. These types of PM’s typically are focused on crafting an ideal user experience and utilize data to optimize the product. The nature of product management also hinges on the organization’s breadth and its work dynamics. Some teams put their efforts mainly into ideation and market research, while others involve themselves in the product’s entire lifecycle. The field of product management essentially bifurcates into technical and non-technical types.
Delving into Technical Product Management
Technical product management revolves around a product-centric (as somewhat opposed to a user focused) mindset. Technical product managers, typically well-versed in specific coding languages, are equipped with the skills necessary to bring a product to life. They pay more attention to product development, as opposed to go-to-market strategies. For a software-driven product launch, a technical product manager can outline the stages and specific tasks related to its development. Product teams that approach their work from the technical side are often more interested in the “doing” and “building” aspects of the product and lean more science than art.
Exploring Non-Technical Product Management
Non-technical product management adopts a customer-centric orientation, emphasizing market research, customer engagement, and marketing strategies. By identifying customer issues, these managers can conceptualize and articulate solutions that lay the foundation and value proposition of a product.
This form of product management takes a broader view, spanning from the initial stages of identifying a customer issue to the product’s eventual launch. Non-technical product managers provide invaluable advice and insights about customer concerns, typically delegating the actual product development to engineers or developers. Counter to the above, these folks are the art types and are interested in strategy, feedback, and the business side of the product.
Product Management vs. Project Management
Product management involves crafting the vision, goals, and path for a product’s ideation, development, and execution. Conversely, project management is more focused on managing specific tasks, often associated with product management.
A project manager might oversee the development of a particular feature, whereas a product manager provides guidance throughout the product’s entire lifespan. These two are regularly and disastrously mistaken for each other. While there is some overlap in the skill sets of both project and product managers, their core function and goals as well as the types of skills and aptitudes necessary to succeed in each are quite different. Trying to treat Product Managers and Project Managers like interchangeable experts is a mistake.
Program Management vs. Product Management
Product management is customer-focused and identifies opportunities, while program management synchronizes different organizational parts to achieve the goals established by product managers.
Program managers adopt a tactical perspective across the organization. While product managers partner with various teams for brainstorming and ideation, program managers ensure logistics align to meet respective deadlines. For instance, a program manager might facilitate hiring for the marketing team or assist customer specialists with training to achieve specific objectives.
This is another regular mistake that people make in assuming that these two roles are basically the same. While they do share similarities the program manager is often more of a tactically deployed and flexible role that drives movement across an organization as needed. Product management on the other hand focuses more deeply on products as defined by their roadmap and domain to maximize their value and hit KPIs.
Product management takes many forms, with the process differing based on the company, the specific product manager, and their scope of responsibility. Nevertheless, there are certain best practices worth implementing, from creating detailed buyer personas to strategizing the introduction of a new product.
Here’s an example of how this process may play out:
- Frame the Problem
All great ideas originate from a well-defined problem. In product management, this involves identifying and defining your customers’ issues, which eventually leads to solutions. This is where we ask the big questions like “what is the point of this product?” and “who is this product for?”. Your framing should be thorough and concise with a fully realized problem statement, theoretical use case, and consumer profile in mind.
- Engage with Stakeholders
Product managers are a cross-functional role in virtually every organization. It’s important to identify governance groups, stakeholders, and their roles within the product’s domain and engage directly and regularly with them for feedback and updates.
- Develop the Idea
This step also includes your data collection and analysis. At this point you have a team and an idea but you don’t yet know if the idea is any good. It’s time to work it over, collect feedback, polish the rough spots and come up with something that looks (at least up to this point) marketable and fit to purpose.
- Design a Product Road Map
A product road map outlines step-by-step milestones for the product’s development and launch process. These documents may span a few months or a few years and will involve feedback and consensus from the relevant stakeholders. Ideally, all groups with some kind of role or governance within your product’s domain should be fully aware and endorse the roadmap. The roadmap will include a product scope, feature set, and iterative planning.
- Prioritize Different Features
Taken from the roadmap, you’ll next need to decide a schedule for how to execute on the roadmap which may require some give and take across teams and resources. Feedback from users is also critical here to know what features or changes are most important to your bottom line.
- Implement the Plan
Once the roadmap is documented and signed off on it’s time to break it up into smaller projects or sprints and begin working on it.
- Test and Optimize
Absolutely no products launch perfectly. Every successful product requires ongoing iteration and optimization and it would be reasonable to say that no product is ever truly “done”. After launching your go-to-market version you’ll immediately want to begin collecting data and making plans for the next push.
This comprehensive process, when followed diligently, can lead to successful product development and market launch. As a seasoned business leader, I can attest to the critical role of a product manager in creating and refining successful products.