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Chapter 7. A great product manager
The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.
An effective product manager must understand many sides of the company in order to do their job effectively. They need to understand the market and how the business works. They need to truly understand the vision and goal of the company. They also need deep empathy for the users for whom they are building products, to understand their needs.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the role of a product manager is that they own the entire product and therefore can tell everyone what to build. Act this way, and you will only alienate the rest of your team. Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building. They know the goal at hand and understand which direction the team should be building toward, depending on company strategy. They communicate this direction to the rest of the team.
The product manager works with the rest of the team to develop the idea and then jumps in, as requirements become validated, to make sure that the product being created achieves the goals of the customer, user, and business. They then work to solidify the product vision, crafting it and communicating it, and then championing it. But, at the end of the day, it’s the team, collectively, that really owns the product—the what.
Figuring out what to build takes a strategic and experimental approach. The product manager should be at the helm of these experiments, while continuing to identify and reveal every known unknown. At the beginning of product development, the known unknowns are usually around problem exploration and customer behavior, such as, “We’re not sure what problem we are solving for the customer.” As these unknowns begin to become clearer, the uncertainty then shifts to what will solve that customer problem. Product managers connect the dots. They take input from customer research, expert information, market research, business direction, experiment results, and data analysis. Then they sift through and analyze that information, using it to create a product vision that will help to further the company and to solve the customers’ needs.
Tech expert versus market expert
UX design and product management overlap quite a bit, but user experience is only one piece of building a great product. Design is a critical component of a successful product, but, again, it’s only one piece. Product management is about looking at the entire system—the requirements, the feature components, the value propositions, the user experience, the underlying business model, the pricing and the integrations—and figuring out how it can produce revenue for the company. It’s about understanding the entire picture of the organization and figuring out how the product—not just the experience—fits into it.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make in hiring a product manager is trying to find either a technical or market expert. Product managers are not experts in either of these domains; they are experts in product management. That doesn’t mean they don’t need knowledge in either of these areas. They need to know just enough to talk with an engineer or a business person and to understand enough to make informed decisions.
A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent. That means they can discuss enough and understand enough about the technology to talk to developers and to make trade-off decisions. They know the right questions to ask engineers to understand the complexity of certain features or improvements.A product manager doesn’t need to be able to code unless the product is highly technical and it’s essential they understand the technology deeply to make decisions.
The same goes for the market. Although it’s valuable for a product manager to know the market well, this is something they can learn. This is all about balancing the skill sets of your team. If you have highly-skilled market analysts, a great product manager knows how to talk to them, learn from them, and harness their skills.
Product management and Scrum
Product management and Scrum can work well together, but product management is not dependent on Scrum. This role should exist with any framework or process.
Management and company support
Most organizations do not give their people the necessary time to do product vision and research work. They would rather hold them responsible for a steady stream of outputs and measure success based on stacking backlogs and writing stories.
Management must setup product managers for success: work together to define goals, and give space to go reach them. The company supports the product manager in the work needed to do to accomplish this.
If you want to build products that create value for your businesses and customers, you need good product management foundations in your company. If you want a career path for your people, you need to give them this foundation so that they can grow into more senior roles. So remind your people to think like product managers. They might be playing the role of a product owner on a Scrum team most days, but you need them to think like a product manager in order to validate that you are building the right things.
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