What does a product manager do and why are they the rockstars of tech?
In our technologically advanced generation, the world has expanded opportunities thanks to the integration of technology and the internet.
Several jobs have progressed thanks to the technological facilities, to name a few, marketing, product management, social media management, and many other opportunities.
Product management is among the few options which converge the digital world of technology into the physical industry.
The intertwining of both network and physical worlds has built better tech products in suitable shapes like 3D modeled objects which ought to be used for technical and discretionary purposes.
However, few examples could be considered, the drones in Robotics made with cameras for diverse purposes, or another sample is the functional prosthetic robotic hands for surgical goals.
Those outcomes are received from special product designing equipment carried out in the three-dimensional format and detailed operating algorithms.
After all, can we assume that the primary rockstars of the tech industry are product managers and their teams?
Who is a product manager, and what are their responsibilities?
By its literal role, a product manager takes responsibility for the product that a business generates.
Objectively speaking, a product manager is an individual charged with the strategy, production plan, production line, or cycle, eventually defining the product’s value with the purposes and benefits behind its usage.
Overall, based on LinkedIn estimation, almost 700,000 product managers are currently employed for the position globally.
These leaders are concentrating on every cycle of production, starting from conception to its launch. They are prominent with their creativity and ideas embedded into the product line and know how to make a prototype that will turn into something beneficial both for customers and business.
Overall, those managers’ focus and responsibilities are on marketing, future forecasting, and the profit and loss of the ventures embarked.
A product manager prioritizes and scrutinizes the opinion and feedback of the customers for eventually laying out the company’s vision including profit and loss.
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The product management part is where the user’s experience, the technologies implemented for the production process, and the business objectives and goals overlap.
After all, the business’s future expectation is to optimize its products with reforms and generate a feasible return on investment strategy.
Below we can find the precise and concise responsibilities of the product manager:
- Projection of the strategy and the vision of the product
- Introducing the business values to the product team
- The trajectory and the planning of the process behind business mentorship and development
- Collaborating with the design and engineering team for building the product
- The content and the timing of the deliverable of the team
- Preparing a prototype to facilitate it
- Determine the pros and cons of the product or the SWAT of the business itself
- Examining and analyzing the market with all the correlations and obstacles and focusing on details.
- Possession an outstanding notion and the ideation establishment with all the processes of generation, developing, and implementing new ideas.
- Collecting, blending, analyzing, promoting the features, and eventually transforming all these ideas into elements and authentic forms
- Ensuring the coherence of the product planning and development procedures with the customer’s constructive feedback and request on the product.
- Determine necessary features integrated to the delivered product in the market with upgrades by answering the “What” and “When.”
- Leading the product development process and management team to success and cooperating closely with the expert engineering team to properly use the resources.
- Closely follow up with the customers through a marketing and monitoring team responsible for collecting customer feedback and suggestions to increase customer engagement.
Tech product management
As part of technology, product management is among the technical product management categories as it ranks among the relatively high technical complexities.
Those tech products are either produced internally for the company or external users like customers; mostly, we pertain to the hardware and software usages. They are either used intentionally made for a purpose or for manufacturing other products.
A primitive example could be a massive robot as the product used for construction with all the background algorithms for robotic functionalities that are the basis used for primary construction purposes, eventually generating new incremental values in the construction industry.
This increment refers to the unceasing and tirelessly functioning of the robots during work, which is ideally an efficient and productive approach compared to the human construction labors they have replaced.
Therefore, their investment cost is enormous enough to return almost all the incurred expenses for the laborers hired with their insurance, sick leaves compensation, retirement, taxes, training, salaries, and so on. Such projections require a long-term planning and decision-making process.
Moreover, this strategic approach will help find investors and platforms for getting financial aid, discover failures, and turn your idea into one of the most funded Kickstarter projects.
The technological product management job is so sensitive for the products they are planning to introduce since those managers need to have a basic or deep acute knowledge of how the product functions and understand and evaluate the impacts caused to their users.
This implies all sorts of products be it electric skateboards or a CRM or rocket building. In addition, a significant role is played by the Business Intelligence team, who design the complex algorithm of their product.
For instance, any Catering industry software, who has access to all the financial status of a restaurant company, is highly vulnerable to any hacking and disclosure of their user’s corporate classified information.
Therefore, the function of the technological product management group extends, but their relative responsibility and confidentiality intensify under the rules of the specific country.
Or if it is outsourced from another country, the need for adaptation to the other country’s laws and regulations.
How to become a rockstar product manager in tech?
Several considerations must be taken into account for a product manager to become a rockstar in a technology environment.
1. Conduct market research
Before jumping ahead into the market and embarking on the business or introducing a particular product, any company deems to take the first and foremost steps as a crucial milestone for their own business and succession planning.
A product manager, especially in the sphere of technology, takes all the measurements meticulously. This is because a single additional undertaking requires a tremendous investment fund for technologies to be implemented into the product line.
Subsequently, all this investment expects a return instead in the long term. Therefore, any product introduction or initiation of a business requires a full investigation through market research, from qualities to quantity and equipment used and customer’s point of view in all regards.
The further the study, the more knowledge, and information will be disclosed and used for business purposes.
Market research consists of different phases. First, common usage of social media became the primary source of collecting feedback and opinions, like sharing questions or asking for feedback on specific topics or products in
Facebook groups. Knowing which categories of groups to choose is essential to have accurate results. Another option is to have an email database accumulated from LinkedIn to contact targeted people for product-related investigations, consultation, or even hiring processes.
In the meantime they need to make sure great email deliverability while also checking SPF records to avoid further errors.
Surveys are key performance indicators of any conducted research, especially when the purpose of the survey and the anonymity of applicants are concealed.
Yet precise and concise questions in Multiple Choice Questions forms, options to select from, and extended response availability all play their primary role in the analysis.
Those surveys would eventually contribute to the better strategic management of products, understanding which group to target, and finding out the issues, or, for instance, the best marketing strategy to apply for improved user acquisition.
2. Manage the product’s vision
Having a vision with any initiative is fundamental. No single company can embark on its business without having a project for the upcoming days or the future and taking care of pop-ups.
The concept of a company’s product or service may differ based on the situation given. Some businesses generate facilities to ease the life of the users, some others solve issues, and many others are created to add value to other products or services.
All these visions’ functionalities are ranked on different levels, starting from micro to macro or P2P to B2C or B2B.
The core values of a company with all the steps and the ideologies behind it do matter. The recognition of their identity and the essence of their existence has a lot of input for the company’s future.
Every company members’ awareness about the progress or the product itself generates value to the team and a higher reputation for the outer world regarding the company. Depending on this, product managers should choose proper strategies, tools, and workforce.
For example, when it comes to social media marketing, product managers need to assess whether the company should find Facebook influencers or share its vision from its own page.
Moreover, the brainstorming process becomes way more accessible, especially in large companies with diverse departments and members. Each individual is aware of the updates and the progress of their company.
3. Partner up with the scrum master:
Scrum is a lightweight framework where people can address perplexing and adaptive problems to deliver products with the highest quality and value productively and creatively. In reality, Scrum is not a methodology but rather a scientific approach that deals with unpredictable results and solves complex counterfeit problems.
This planning turns into success thanks to the scrum master who fosters individuals, teams, and organizations to generate values through feasible and adaptive solutions for complicated issues encountered.
In general, there is always an unceasing cycle of improvement where the product is soothing and developing. The product owner addresses a complex problem to the scrum team to find solutions.
The outcome received will eventually add an incremental value to the product while the team and the stakeholders will inspect the consequences and adjust for a better result at last.
This Scrum approach is implemented by approximately 12 million people globally. It includes the dynamic list of all the required undertakings needed for the product to work in the “Backlog” by a self-organizing development team for one to four weeks.
This is also known as “sprint,” where the goals and backlogs are formulated. This listing takes place daily for around 15 to 30 minutes of brainstorming by the scrum team, who aim towards the sprint goal and get inspected by the scrum leader.
This individual is the person who guides the group and examines objectively as well as reforms the backlog progressively.
Thanks to the team and the scrum master, once the deadline of the sprint ends, a group of stakeholders reaches out to collectively inspect the outcomes and evaluate the work plan.
Eventually, this is an ideal approach to deliver higher values and better results to the existing customers more frequently.
Meanwhile, all those events during scrum are genuinely a bewildering procedure with lots of fixtures, add-ups, and modifications. Yet, interestingly, the backlog has several practical steps for the consistency of the group work, which makes the management framework agile:
- Determine the issue and identify opportunities.
- Reflect on the performance with the wins and losses of the previous Sprint outcomes.
- Deploy measurements and succinct undertakings needed to be implemented.
- Understand the issue and evaluate the plausible solutions.
- Build-on experience strategy to progress step-by-step.
On the other hand, there is a specific scrum master guide on the artifact or the tool created to solve issues known as “agile.” This tool is based on the agile product development methodology and consists of three main components.
Product Backlog:
This is the preliminary list of requirements, work, enhancements, and fixtures needed to be implemented and maintained by the product owner or manager. This exhaustive and dynamic list is frequently re-visited and reprioritized with all the approaches, solutions, and issues.
Daily, the whole group brainstormed the last discussion with comments and suggestions for reforms and focused on the present and future topics to digest and research. Every proposal or point represented requires many rigid sources of validity and credibility to be adopted as a feasible solution.
You are planning to sell a sports product via social media and want to use social media to build an online community for your brand. Several verifications and empirical statistical data are required to determine which online platform is the most active and convenient for selling finance and feasibility.
For instance, Instagram sales are booming with low costs incurred, and the scrum team needs to analyze Instagram followers’ demographic as a part of the Sprint Backlog and planning procedure. This can be done through special software or in cooperation with the marketing team.
- Sprint Backlog: The development Scrum team determines the planning time interval for the cycle and the needed resources while setting fundamentals and fulfilling objectives for the whole sprint.
- Increment: The deliverable and the end-product of the sprint, which is subject to evolve over the sprints. For example, if you are developing an online graphic maker platform, the increment would be the functionality of the font.
4. Create a roadmap
Having a well formulated roadmap is a must if you want to successfully achieve a goal. This is a must whether you decide to start dropshipping business in India or plan to open a local bakery. After all, failing to plan is a plan to fail.
Before we go forward with creating the roadmap, we first need to clarify what the technology or IT roadmap is in general. A technological roadmap for product management is a top-notch visual plan technical strategy aimed at a specific product design and development.
This roadmap allows internal teams to communicate and implement strategic decisions around technical infrastructures while simply putting the IT and product development professionals with executives.
These discussions are value-based to help executives grasp to what extent this crucial investment in IT for product development is worth implementing.
This IT roadmap is proper guidance used for distinct purposes and with different approaches.
We commonly associate the related concepts and the objectives like the product managers with the ones creating the roadmaps and the product roadmaps with the development notions and strategies for products.
Yet, those are solely the integral part of any business initiative aimed at upgrading the companies’ technological pillars and have several proper functions such as:
- Assessing the capacities and the skills of the IT, product management, and staff
- Establishing a list of initiatives and projects can customize and reform to ensure the alignment of all department’s actions and plannings.
- Understanding the needs of your strategic business planning as compared to the current state of your IT infrastructure and held resources to assess and fill gaps
- Auditing and estimating relative costs and duration of proposed projects by analyzing the IT infrastructure alongside the best practices and the industry standards.
These technological product roadmaps aim to help align the objectives, the progress of work, and decision-making strategies with stakeholders’ reviews and expectations.
They are customized for any areas of focus where the product managers, alongside the stakeholders, would be concentrated for short-term and long-term strategic plannings as a high-level draft for the project plan.
For example, when it comes to SaaS products, managers need to make decisions regarding the marketing approach, use proper SaaS onboarding email templates, consider different solutions for product boost, etc.
After all, those roadmaps are prompt to precisely determine, evaluate, and communicate the visions and undertakings clearly and concisely.
This process will all rundown to the product team to work or operate on those points accordingly, after determining the objective strategies with the features, requirements, and resources alongside reviewing and managing the ideas.
These would potentially become things that you want to highlight in sales, ads, unbox therapy, or other marketing activities.
Yet, it’s crucial to remember that the roadmap doesn’t stop with the decision making and planning but also following up and analyzing the coordination of those procedures. This often gets lost during the work process.
Including roadmaps into strategic planning and the decision-making process has many benefits. The key ones are:
- Swiftly addressing issues and brainstorming to reform or fix them as well as resolve conflicts.
- Clarity of goals and objectives among all stakeholders of the project plans with the alignment to the business vision.
- Economizing on undue and unnecessary costs as well as evade from inefficient applications for the product management through IT
- Boosting productivity with the adjustment of the proper technological equipment that meets the needs.
- Avoid time-consuming system failures and work on improving the weaknesses of your business and intensifying the strengths.
5. Assess risks
Just like the benefits of product management from resources and capacities available, product managers are also responsible for taking care of all the impending risks that may put the business plan into jeopardy.
Therefore, product managers need to realize and identify the potential risks before they happen as a proactive step. This way, they will understand where the issues emerge from and what solutions to resolve them.
Throughout the product life cycle stages, the product manager should be cautious and alarming about the impending risks. The latter is mainly related to the timeline, the ability to meet scrum KPIs, and any factors influencing the product directly and indirectly.
For instance, this could be connected to the internal team’s lack of knowledge or misunderstanding of some key points such as bot protection while building the product’s website.
There are two categories of product risk management: strategic and execution.
Strategic risk management includes ensuring the right features of the product at the right time by understanding the trends using Google Trends API.
It also includes meeting all the KPIs of the customer and the business. Let’sLet’s take the example of iPhones. When the new iPhones were about to launch, product managers considered new features and functionalities worth incorporating.
They also think about the exact time frame between the last and new models and ensure the promotion is at its peak time of highest sales to reap the most out of advertisements.
A frequent situation that product managers deal with is handling not planned events. It is very crucial for a product manager to make these prompt decisions that give very little time for thinking and no opportunity for assessing the risks and long term effects.
However, if the product manager fails to do that future issues may cost more in terms of finances, time and resources spent to correct that.
For that very reason, it is extremely important for a product manager to be as risk averse, aware and long-term strategist as possible. It can also be gained through an extensive experience of dealing with such situations.
On the other hand, the execution risk assessment puts the spotlight on financial risks the company may encounter if the product faces operational issues and potential roadblocks because of lack of funding, bureaucratic problems, and whatnot.
Finally, another area of the PM’s work we should not forget about is the finances. Often, product managers are people who come up with a pricing strategy for a product or service.
If your business has high-value pricing and deals with many customers, you should consider a B2B payment processing method to support them.
6. Take the lead
According to Upgrade.com, Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Uber all have ensured the recruitment of creative, detailed drive, well-organized product managers.
One of the key reasons behind the company’s success is having those talented people as part of their management team to take responsibility for the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of its operations.
Research shows that, on average, product managers spend 45% of their time working out unexpected problems. No wonder they need to be good leaders.
Taking leadership is unavoidable for a job of this nature. Taking the lead means being a good communicator and a person who knows what the team is capable of. Even in such situations, a product manager must always keep in mind the famous saying, “Build one, sell many times.”
To make the leadership even more valid and get the team’s trust, a product manager needs to be as factual as possible.
Everything discussed should be backed up with facts. You might think this sounds extreme: how can ‘everything’ be backed with facts? But that’s the only way to go if you want to build a truly great product.
Not a product that you like and hope that customers will enjoy. But a product you are 99% sure customers will love! The only way to achieve such results is to lead the team with data-driven, objective solutions aligned with the product mission and vision.
For example, say you are a product manager at a company that is making games for children. Taking the leadership and building a roadmap as if you know how the games should be for children sounds like a failure.
Why is this a failure? Because most probably you are over 18 years old and even you have children, there is a high probability that your taste and interests are way different.
In these cases, research, user feedback, and constant pivot to incorporate the input are the recipes for successful product development and leadership. Developing a buyer persona is one of the critical steps you need to take towards data-driven product development.
Finally, it would help if you were a strong leader to keep up with the team spirit. Your responsibility is to make sure everyone is motivated to contribute their best to what they are working on.
You should also make sure that everyone is working on what they are best at. Finally, it would help if you led the team to keep up with the product roadmap, meet the set deadlines, and achieve the listed milestones.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is for you to set realistic goals in front of your team. If you fail to do that, it will demotivate your team and eventually exhaust them.
If you are not sure how much a particular thing will take, be constantly in touch with team members. In other words, keep up with your standup meetings and always follow the challenges the team faces and how you, as a leader, can solve them.
What skills and characteristics make a product manager great?
Besides responsibilities, product managers from the technology industry have distinctive traits and characteristics. Let’s quickly cover some of them:
- They are tech experts and have developed an intuition to understand the customers’ needs and deliver products that meet them.
- They are also quick learners, especially when learning about the new industries where the demand is booming.
- They also know how to organize the work process and prioritize the tasks correctly, even when facing pressure.
- They can execute the plan by encouraging, providing the necessary resources, and convincing the team to be excited and work on the project with motivation and strategic sensibilities.
- They are perfect communicators and negotiators with internal and external parties alongside their detail-oriented skills and measurements and data-driven approaches.
According to Linkedin Blog analysis conducted by an entrepreneur and business executive, product managers are popular with the following qualities:
- Strategic Thinkers as the mini-CEOs
- Passionate about their position and product launches.
- Prioritizes the perspect