Is product management (PM) similar to project management? Is it related to marketing? What is it exactly? If you have these questions then you have landed on the right post. In this post you’ll learn about product management nuances, similar titles, and PM’s daily life.
If you googled, you’d find a ton of PM definitions:
- Product management is an intersection of business, design, and technology
- It is a function that is responsible for all aspects of product life cycle – Wikipedia
- Product manager is responsible for end to end product experience
Let’s break this definition further.
The scope of the PM consists of the entire product life cycle, ranging from new product introduction, growth, maturity, through regrowth or decline.
Product management evolved a lot over the years to get to this definition. Let me share a brief history with you.
History of Product Management
- The earliest mention about PM is in the 1930s, P&G shared a memo about “Brand Men”, who were responsible for tracking sales, product, ads, and promotions.
- During the 1940s, HP organized the company into product groups to better understand customer needs to drive product requirements.
- In the 60s, consumer good companies such as Kraft, Tide, Lipton etc, created a role called Brand Managers, who were responsible for brand positioning, price, promo, packaging, marketing.
- It was in the 80s, when Intuit created the first software product managers, merging the roles of Brand management and product development.
- Finally in the 2000s, the modern era of product managers, started with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Startups.
As you might have noticed, the modern era of PM is recent, and continues to evolve everyday. But the good news is that demand for PMs is growing every year. Take a look at the Google trends graph below.
What do Product Manager do?
You might be thinking that this is all fine, but what do PMs actually do? So here we go.
It changes based on company and industry, but product managers are responsible for the success (or failure) of the product. They are involved in the why, what, when, and how of the product.
- Why: Motivate teams with a business case to start a new product or feature.
- What: Define the vision and product requirement by collaborating with stakeholders.
- When: Prioritize features along with high level timelines for launches
- How: Review design and technology architecture
To better illustrate this, let’s walkthrough an example.
A PM Scenario
Let’s imagine that you are living in a household with your family. In this world, your grandma is the head of your family, and she says to you: “We haven’t had a celebration in a while”. So you put your PM hat on and get the ball rolling.
Research
- You talk to your friends and family to understand how they view celebrations.
- Search the internet to learn about successful celebrations.
- Look at your past celebrations and see what succeeded and what failed.
Vision
- Based on your research you decide that it has to be food related.
- You define the vision as “Celebrate with the best meal your friends & family ever had”.
- Convince your family on this vision.
Requirements
- Draft the menu items based on the taste profiles of the visitors.
- Collaborate with your friend (a.k.a program manager) to estimate the cost and people needed for your requirements.
- Work with the program manager to layout the plan to get ingredients, prepare, cook, send invitations.
Implementation
You oversee the entire implementation, driven by program and project managers to ensure a successful celebration event.
Feedback
At the end of day, you collect feedback from all the visitors, friends, and family to gauge interest. You report this back to your grandma about how great the event went. You then use this celebration as a learning for future celebrations.
A day in PM’s life
I hope you got a high level idea of what a PM does through the above food celebration example. But, the below picture gives you a list of activities that a PM does in a typical technology company.
Typically, a PM spends most of the time in the activities to your left in the picture, and minimal time on the the activities to your right in the picture. Again, this changes based on company, organization, or industry.
PM Role Variance
As seen in picture above, there are various roles that get confused with product management. Many companies are still learning about product management as it is an evolving discipline.
Product manager: More involved with strategy and less involved with day to day tactical logistics. Closer to product development but also acts an interface to product marketing.
Project manager: More involved with tactical day to day logistics and operational work and less involved with high level strategic product goals.
Program manager: Involved with horizontal programs ranging from marketing through product development. They can be both strategic as well as tactical.
Product marketing manager: Involved with branding, positioning, media, marketing, messaging and constantly interacts with product manager.
What’s next?
Even though a job has the title of “product manager” it could mean different roles at different companies ranging from project managers to marketing managers. Hence my next post is about how to research PM jobs. It goes in depth into shortlisting companies and transitioning into PM from your current roles.
I hope this post was useful for you, please comment with any questions about product management.
