Product Managers: Why are they important?

Last Updated: 16 August 2022

Product managers: Are they required? It is a topic of fierce debate. The person you ask will determine the answer.

Some claim that “Product Managers are outmoded.” They are redundant and expensive, and their only purpose is to widen the gap between users and programmers. I argue, however, that product managers must handle various details about the end-product and deliver quality to the customers.

So, in this post, let’s see how product managers are important for an organization and how their roles help the organization grow!

1. Product Managers Give Direction

A venture without a product manager lacks focus, and consistency. Design, production, advertising, and internal and external stakeholders cannot communicate when no product manager exists. In this way, the expected quality of the product at each stage and strict deadlines are not met.

Product managers focus on the engineering team’s technical configuration, the PR team’s marketing strategy, and production speed and suggest changes to ensure the project reaches its goal.

These teams, on their own, will function as broken blocks instead of as a cohesive whole.

The Product Manager ensures that everyone on the team remains committed to the project’s overall vision and objectives. They enable the team to react swiftly and proactively by spotting issues as they develop. The outcome? Increased productivity, lower costs, and lower risk.

2. Primary Point of Contact between the User and the Organization

The world is progressively shifting towards services that are enabled by products. Most tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Freshworks, and UrbanClap, have embraced effective product management systems. Software product companies also need talented product managers to expand their operations if they want to reach such heights.

Whether it is global technology behemoths like Google and Microsoft or upstarts like Freshworks or UrbanClap, most successful businesses have released products that address their customers’ concerns in various ways. This tendency has accelerated further as more firms use the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) subscription model as a practical way to pay for what they use.

The creation of items requires cooperation and communication.

A product manager is the team’s primary point of contact and gatekeeper between the client and the team. They oversee informing all team members and interested parties of project-related news and ensuring everyone on the team collaborates and focuses on the product’s overall vision and objectives.

Without a Product Manager, the team’s internal and outside members no longer have a single point of contact. As a result of differing informational interpretations, there is miscommunication and distortion. Conflicting priorities and viewpoints impede growth. Requests can get lost, and details can be forgotten. There is no single individual whose primary concern and goal is the product’s success.

3. Responsible for Seamless Functioning

A project manager directly impacts the development process. They are responsible for planning, approving, prioritizing, and structuring tasks.

These responsibilities must still be acknowledged and delegated without a dedicated product manager, yet the result is not as satisfactory. This is because every team involved in the product development and production process works according to their own internal structure and priorities.

However, a product manager performs this task on the project level instead of the team level. In other words, they work as a lubricant that allows the entire machine to operate smoothly.

4. Deals with Project-level Decision Making

The Product Manager is the decision-maker, even though he is not always in charge of defining the functionality or specs of the product.

Product managers set priorities and decide on actions that affect the entire project from conception to completion. They know the digital strategy and how to create a comprehensive product roadmap. To effectively manage the ship, they must comprehend the effects of these choices and the underlying forces that motivate them.

5. Allocates Resources Intelligently

No matter how massive, an organization has a limited set of resources. The opportunities, however, are too vast, and intelligent resource allocation is required to ensure effectiveness.

This is where product managers come in to make the organization successful. They hand-pick profitable opportunities and deploy resources accordingly to ensure they get the most out of their investment.

At the same time, a product manager also battles internally to successfully utilize budget, time, and scope limitations while delivering the end-product. The process of developing a product is intricate and has many moving elements. A successful product manager needs to be well-rounded in their knowledge and have a high-level project vision.

6. Keeps up to date with Changing Market Trends

Obtaining success once is easier than keeping it. To ensure you win every time, innovation and upgradation are necessary.

Product managers ensure that a company is not becoming redundant by introducing new policies, work instructions, and innovative ideas in line with the market trends.

One example is smartphones –when their era began, Nokia and Blackberry religiously stuck to their techniques while both the developers and the customers moved on. As a result, the products of these companies were flushed out of the market.

Product managers prevent that by ensuring that the realities and pace of the international community are being met by the organization internally.

So, Can You Function Without a Product Manager?

Product managers are necessary when you need to build a product. However, having a specific Product Manager for businesses that are services oriented, or solopreneurs might not be helpful. The budget may not allow it.

In such circumstances, the team can function without a dedicated PM. However, the overall procedure is unaltered.

Both decisions and responsibility assignments need to be made. A prominent team member will frequently assume many roles, or several people will divide the workload.

When assessing whether your team requires a product manager, consider the following aspects:

Who will be responsible for the Product-Market-Fit journey and with the communication with the clients?
Who is most knowledgeable about the product market, including the rivalry, growth potential, value, and profit?
Who sets the project’s goals, determines its course, and ensures everyone on the team is on the same page?
How will the essential tasks be prioritized? What are the required tasks?
How many individuals and groups are involved? A higher level of supervision is necessary for more extensive and specialized teams.
What tasks are required to complete the project? Goals, deliverables, features, timeframes, and costs are determined by who ultimately bears responsibility for them.
Only 10% of startups succeed. Only 40% of newly created items succeed in reaching the market. Only 60% of them are profitable. Who oversees the end-user experience, product launch, and market research?

If this is imprecise, it is because the role is not easy to pin down. Product managers frequently act as leaders rather than managers since they have control over cross-functional teams but lack direct reporting lines and responsibility for sizable groups.

Conclusion:

The product management function may be divided across positions like group product manager, technical product manager, growth product manager, and product owner in a larger organization. Looking at things from the standpoint of product management, someone there, like the vice president of product, will oversee everything.

The duties and responsibilities of the product manager will keep changing over time, but the product’s success will always be the top priority. The world will always require great product managers because they have a clear idea of accomplishment and a practical understanding of how to get there.

So, if your organization is big enough and the user requirements are intricate and complex, consider investing in a project manager and see your organization change gears quickly!