What is a Product?

5 minutes read

A product is a solution to a problem experienced by multiple people. Great products gel at the intersection of business, technology, and design. “Product” is a broad term that can mean software, physical goods, consulting services, a training course — anything that people buy and sell. Products work when there’s a balance of technology, business, and design.

Product Intersection

What is Product Management?

Product management is a way to plan, organise, and guide a product from inception to distribution - right from development to positioning and pricing. It is a discipline which focuses on the product and its customers first and foremost. It is quite complex and it involves the coordination of data, processes, teams, systems etc while maintaining the product vision and integrating customer insight along the way. It helps in focusing efforts in building high value products.

Who is a Product Manager?

Product managers provide the expertise needed to lead and make strategic product decisions. They sit at the intersection of business, technology and design. They lay out the strategy, roadmap and features of a product. They analyse market and competitive landscapes, identify the customer problems, create and validate the hypothesis and deliver solutions.

They articulate what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality. They work with different kinds of customers, different kinds of business stakeholders, and different kinds of development teams.

What are the skills of a Product Manager?

Product Managers deal with a variety of stakeholders - customers, suppliers, partners, investors, executives, management etc. They are responsible for the strategy, roadmap, feature definition and also to provide the best possible customer experience.

A Product Manager is:

  • Detail oriented
  • Big picture thinker
  • Analytical
  • An expert on the market
  • The voice of customers
  • A leader
  • A jack of all trades
  • Diplomatic
  • An effective communicator
  • Team capacity and skills
  • Competitive insights
  • Analytics and metrics

A Product Manager is NOT:

  • A Project manager
  • A developer
  • Customer support
  • An order taker
  • The boss
  • The scapegoat

What are the responsibilities of a Product Manager?

While the responsibilities of a Product Manager vary across organisations, but broadly they do the below:

  • Providing direction and giving insights on what the customers want
  • Formulating and planning the product strategy and product roadmap
  • Defining the features for a product
  • Writing epics and user stories
  • Decide and manage product feature releases
  • Generating ideas for new and future product development
  • Maintaining effective communication between key stakeholders
  • Developing, maintaining and communicating progress against the product roadmap
  • Working cross-functionally with many teams - mainly with UX, developers, QA, researchers, data analysts, sales and marketing etc.
  • Ensuring that the development team is focusing on the most important features of the product
  • Compiling customer feedback to perceive and understand how customers feel about the product
  • Collecting, curating, and promoting the most relevant ideas into features
  • Metrics tracking and taking decisions based on the metrics
  • Creating and maintaining user personas
  • Signing off stories before they are pushed into production
  • Etc

Conclusion

Product Managers are often called ‘CEO of their product’ as they are responsible for making sure that the right product is shipped to the customer. A PM is a high impact leadership role. They play a key role, serving as a liaison between software development teams and all other parts of the business.