Everything You Need To Know About Being A Product Manager!

Last Updated: 16 August 2022

Companies that offer multiple products to their customers often require product managers to oversee everything from the product’s strategy to its development. The growing trend of product-led growth has resulted in 43% of businesses hiring more product managers, reflecting a growing demand for their services.

Product management is a unique career, as product managers are involved in all aspects of product development, from ensuring product-market fit to designing user experiences, engineering, and design. While product managers are not salespeople or marketers, they may also be responsible for tasks similar to those in both roles. This can make it difficult to understand what they do.

In this post, I will provide a comprehensive overview of product managers and their responsibilities, even if you have no prior experience in product management.

What is a Product Manager?

A Product Manager is an expert who oversees all stages of product, software, or service development, from inception to maintenance. Their responsibilities include putting product strategies into practice, ensuring customer value, and conveying the product’s vision to internal teams. Their primary duty is to determine what to produce to benefit both the business and its customers, and they must optimize each area to increase the organization’s value.

Product Managers are critical to the business’s strategy and development, as they communicate information and ensure that everyone knows their objectives. They must be strong leaders with excellent communication skills to guide their teams and ensure that deadlines are met and timings are taken care of in every step of the process.

Responsibilities of a Product Manager

The role of a product manager involves creating a product vision and developing a feasible production plan. They are responsible for managing and coordinating engineering teams throughout the design and deployment of the product, as well as defining deliverables for other development teams. It is the product manager’s responsibility to identify customer problems that the company aims to solve and work with design and engineering teams to test and implement solutions.

According to McKinsey & Company, design-driven projects account for nearly 80% of the work carried out by product managers. Therefore, the product manager’s tasks include developing a product concept, creating a viable production strategy, and leading engineering teams from initial planning to final product delivery. This entails recognizing the problems or issues that customers face and that the company attempts to address.

Ultimately, product managers collaborate with design and development teams to evaluate and implement solutions and launch the product into the market. In some cases, the product manager may need to prioritize which issues to address immediately and determine whether to address certain customer challenges now or in the future, depending on the business’s goals and resources.

Qualities of a Good Product Manager

Listed below are some of the key qualities that a good product manager should possess:

1. Innovative Problem-Solving Techniques

Effective product managers have a proven track record of resolving customer problems and company issues using innovative problem-solving techniques. They exercise creativity to come up with user-centric fixes that may not have been considered by the engineering team, based on user research.

2. Conceptual Approach

To manage a product’s life cycle successfully, effective product managers always have a plan and the end in mind, which requires a lot of conceptual approaches. They exhibit traits of a strategic mindset, such as sharp listening and questioning abilities, bias awareness, and task prioritization.

3. Cooperative Mentality

Product managers need to collaborate with many teams, departments, and individuals to find solutions for developing a perfect product. While some may prefer to work independently, being able to take the first step to collaborate with others is crucial to success in this role.

4. Exceptional communication abilities

Excellent communication abilities are essential for product managers as they need to communicate with clients and team members. While extroversion is not a requirement, if you don’t enjoy interacting with others, the product management position may not be suitable for you.

5. Strong Sensitivity Threshold

Product managers need to have empathy and the ability to put themselves in their customers’ shoes to comprehend what is wrong with a product. By managing the product’s life cycle and developing solutions that best meet consumer requirements, they can create products that resonate with their target audience.

Conclusion

Most product management positions require a bachelor’s degree in business or a related field, although candidates with backgrounds in public relations, marketing, economics, or math may also be sought. While becoming a product manager may be challenging due to the requirement for prior expertise, anyone can start by resolving each issue that consumers face related to their company’s vision, solving problems one by one, and gradually building their skill set. With enough persistence and determination, they can become a product manager that produces some of the best products for their market!