“Success is just a never-ending process of getting better and better at whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.”
– John Traver, Co-Founder and CTO of Frame.io
A question often asked today is “how do you define the role of the product manager in today’s app-driven economy?” Consider this. In most startups, the CEO or CTO in all likelihood also plays the role of product manager. Even in established organizations, where does the manager belong? Marketing or Design or Development; because he/she seems to be wearing all those hats. In fact, some even argue that management can even be a part-time role for someone in these areas or for senior management itself.
Let us try to analyze product management in three aspects.
1. What does the position entail and what does it take to be successful there, as this can help someone make the biggest career change or start a new one? or, for that matter, help you assess the right candidate.
2. What is your role in agile development? Because of the critical role a manager can play here
3. Can product management be outsourced? Since this decision can affect time to market/quality/competitiveness/profitability like no other.
What is the role of product management?
Laurence Bradford writes in the Forbes article: 8 Tips for Landing Your First Product Manager Role, he writes, “The role sits at the intersection of business, technology, and design, blending strategy, marketing, leadership, and other skills.” with the ultimate goal of launching an amazing product”.
One thing is given: the importance and breadth of the role of the product manager. Today’s complex business and technology landscape, as well as the constant turnover in an organization’s product portfolio, requires a more active role for the manager. The basic minimums of the role include:
1. Understand the vision of product management and communicate it effectively to design, development, testing and marketing teams (in their own languages).
2. Conduct market research, technology research, and an analysis of the company’s own business model to validate the product idea, determine its feature set, and development roadmap.
3. Drive product development through its various stages, working with multiple teams, to meet customer requirements, deadlines, and quality and safety standards.
4. Establish an environment of fluid collaboration between the different teams to meet, as Bradford says, the end of the launch of an amazing product.
Depending on the character of the organization and how an organization defines its scope, the role may lean more towards technology or marketing. While that is a moot point, the requirement that the manager know and speak the language of marketing and technology is a given.
From a skills perspective, whether you have a management or engineering background, to be a successful manager in today’s development scenario you must have: (a) a strong understanding of programming with the ability to code yourself, (b ) UX design experience, and (c) analytical thinking and problem-solving skills, in addition to more generic management skills such as negotiation, communication, documentation, time management, delegation, stakeholder management, and leadership.
The role of the product manager in agile development
The manager’s role becomes even more exciting and challenging in an agile environment. Yes, we call it an environment, because organizations are increasingly adopting ‘agile’ as a culture, not just a strategy for a particular product or project. In this environment, the features of a product or even the product itself are perpetually in a dynamic state. Unlike traditional management, which moves along a linear roadmap with critical paths, in an agile environment, product management takes an iterative approach to development with regular feedback intervals. And these iterations should allow the user to interact with the product during development.
Although the most popular agile development system, Scrum, creates a new role: product owner, some organizations have merged the roles of product owner and product manager into one role, and some have used these two names interchangeably. But the fact is that the manager’s role has become more intense, both on the development side (sustainable development), where backers, developers and users should be able to keep a steady pace indefinitely, coupled with continued attention to technical excellence. . and good design) and marketing (value creation, where time, features, and roadmap are tested and calibrated based on customer feedback and research).
Writing on How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise back in 2009, Catherine Conner had these four practical tips for adapting product management to agile needs:
1. Stop doing work that does not provide real value to the customer, directly or indirectly, and communicate what you will stop doing.
2. Encourage live interaction over extensive documentation, whether it’s outlining a business case to executives or documenting requirements.
3. Practice ruthless triage, whether it’s prioritizing requirements, business goals, or your daily activities, assign real priority numbers.
4. Accept change as an opportunity instead of a threat.
Can product management be outsourced?
There is a strong argument against outsourcing product management: the function is said to be too strategic and comprehensive to be left to experts outside of your control. It has its merits. But, as Roman Pavlyuk aptly describes in his blog on SalesForce, there are five compelling reasons to outsource any technology service, which also apply to product management.
1. Reduce operating costs
2. Improve corporate focus
3. Get access to world-class capabilities
4. Free internal resources for other purposes
5. Take advantage of resources that are not available internally
The question is not ‘Can product management be outsourced?’ Rather it is more about ‘If you outsource product management; and if so, how?