A Product Manager deals with a series of products or product lines throughout the entire life of the product, from logic through development, launch sale, and eventually discontinuance.
Product Managers interface between the market as-well-as the product team during development, serving as the voice of the customer while also maintaining the portfolio of products they employ to drive sales and profitability.
Types of Product Managers
Product managers are liable for influencing the success of a product and leading the cross-functional team that is answerable for improving it.
It is a prominent organizational role, especially in technology enterprises, that establishes the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for a product line.
There exist two types of product manager roles in various companies, with each position having its unique set of responsibilities.
1. Lightweight Product Managers
These Product Managers evaluate the market and analyze opportunities for the latest products. They put efforts into understanding customer needs and establish requirements for new products.
They help plan and supervise the product line and do not have overall profit-and-loss responsibility for the entire lineup.
They rely immensely on Finance to create business cases for products, and executive management exercises a more prominent role in planning and conducting the product portfolio for the product line.
2. Heavyweight Product Managers
Heavyweight Product Managers bear all the responsibilities described for the Lightweight Product Manager. Besides, they possess higher authority and responsibility to administer the product line profit and loss.
Their role is like the General Manager for the product line. They play a more significant role in evaluating which products to manufacture and in portfolio planning for the lineup of products.
They collaborate with executive management as if management acts as the banker to fund their development projects. Heavyweight Product Managers supervise the development efforts of the product team.
Varied Roles of a Product Manager
Here are the general roles of a product manager when working on developing new products –
1. Strategy
The product manager is responsible for establishing a product vision and strategy for their latest launches.
Their job is to pitch the business value precisely to the product team, so they realize the intent behind the latest product or product release.
The product manager controls the roadmap and must prioritize building what holds the highest significance to achieve the strategic objectives and initiatives behind the latest launch.
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2. Ideation
Every organization seeks decent ideas; however, it is arduous to manage and prioritize them. Product managers handle the creative process of generating, building, and curating new ideas.
They determine which ideas must get promoted into features to push the product strategy ahead, namely those that will accomplish fundamental objectives for the product line and business.
They also ensure that feedback as-well-as requests are integrated seamlessly into the product planning and development processes. Product managers then convey the status of ideas back to the customers, partners, and internal team personnel who proposed them.
3. Releases
Product managers are required to plan what their teams will deliver as-well-as the timeline for implementation. This statement holds true, no matter the development methodology used by the engineering team.
The product manager is responsible for determining the release process and coordinating all the activities involved in launching the product in the market.
This role involves bridging gaps across various functions within the organization and coordinating all the teams involved, such as marketing, sales, as-well-as customer support.
Responsibilities of a product manager also include managing dependencies in and across various releases to accomplish release phases and milestones.
4. Features
The product manager prioritizes features by having them ranked against the strategic goals and initiatives.
This argument demands uncertain trade-off decisions, as per the value that additional features will deliver to customers and the business.
The product manager is also accountable for establishing the requirements for each feature and the pivotal user experience.
Product managers work intimately with engineering on the technical blueprints to ensure that teams have all the knowledge they require to deliver a polished product to market.
Miscellaneous Responsibilities
Check out some more miscellaneous roles and responsibilities of a product manager in a firm –
- Domain Expertise: Product Managers must possess knowledge of the market and product area. PMs must know their customers and the ways through which businesses operate.
- Business Expertise: The Product Manager acts as the CEO of the product. PMs, ensure that the company is generating a steady flow of profit. PMs must possess a suite of business skills to keep the product afloat and profitable.
- Leadership Skills: Since you are the product manager of a company, other employees will turn towards you for guidance. If you lack leadership skills under your sleeve, your career as a PM might not stay afloat for long.
- Operational Competency: Product Managers must dive deep into the intricate details that are required to manage a product. For instance, forming part numbers or updating a spreadsheet.
Some other responsibilities include –
- Acts as the customer advocate and articulates the needs of the user and the buyer.
- PMs possess technical product knowledge or distinct domain expertise.
- PMs also execute beta and pilot programs during the qualifying phase with almost finalized products as-well-as samples.
- PMs are market experts and thus, possess a thorough understanding of the reasons why customers purchase products. This role includes understanding the competition and the way customers think before buying your product.
- Product Managers must have market research and competitive analysis skills to execute marketing reviewing tasks.
- Product managers develop positioning for the product.
- PMs also recommend or contribute knowledge in setting product pricing.
Final Words
Building great products is invigorating, and successful products get developed and adopted by customers after a team of committed, concentrated, and passionate team members play their parts to the best of their competencies.
The product building team gets supervised by a competent product manager who holds a profound sense of responsibility for their role and managing all the factors defined above.