What Is Product Management? Career Options To Consider – Forbes Advisor
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What is product management? This field involves overseeing new products and services from initial conception and development all the way to launch. Product managers decide which products are made and how they are made and released.
These professionals typically propose new ideas for product and feature development, then collaborate with designers and engineers to make those ideas come to life. They also ensure finished products meet consumers’ needs.
A set of increasingly influential practices from the world of software development—such as the Agile theory of project management—has made product management more prominent in recent decades. Below, we translate the key concepts behind product management into terms people outside the profession can readily understand.
What is Product Management?
Product management features three commonly agreed-upon focus areas, or pillars: product discovery, product planning and product development. Read on to learn more.
Product Discovery
Product discovery means deciding what to build. It is arguably the most important responsibility within product management.
A product manager identifies new opportunities by soliciting customers’ feedback. Are customers’ needs being met? Is there a competing product their company can improve to meet those needs more efficiently? A product manager sometimes supplements this kind of customer and client feedback with market research.
Effective product discovery focuses on core features, avoiding scope creep—add-ons that others at the company may try to introduce.
Product Planning
Product planning involves developing a guide—often called a roadmap—for product design. Using the information gathered in product discovery, the roadmap sets out a timeline, identifies key milestones and divides responsibilities among teams, all to achieve the best possible product.
Product managers update roadmaps as projects unfold so all stakeholders know products’ development status, including how much work remains on a project.
Product Development
Product development, the broadest of these three categories, encompasses the entire development process. This pillar includes all the stages necessary for bringing a new product to market, from the original vision through the product’s release to the consumer and beyond. It covers the build, testing and launch phases of the product life cycle.
What is a Product Manager?
Product managers shepherd new products and services into being, ushering them from development to execution and release. They use market research in the discovery phase to ascertain consumers’ needs. Product managers know the competitive landscape for new products—who their most likely users are and where opportunities for improvement and expansion lie.
However, product management jobs can take on different specializations within this wide field, which we explore below.
Types of Product Managers
Each of the following roles within product management focuses on specialized aspects of the product development process. Qualifications for these careers may include varying levels of knowledge and experience.
Data Product Manager
Data product managers incorporate data-driven insights into the development process. The information these product managers use comes from several sources, such as market research, in-house product testing and metrics associated with a product’s use—its number of users, for instance. A data product manager sifts through this information and translates it into plain terms that colleagues can readily use during development.
Growth Product Manager
Growth product managers are responsible for ensuring products scale up. They experiment with strategies for retaining customers and acquiring new ones by expanding consumer awareness. They analyze the results of those experiments and create plans for increasing their products’ market share.
Because they work extensively with analytics, growth product managers are typically more focused on short-term commercial goals or metrics than general product managers.
Technical Product Manager
Technical product managers bring design and engineering expertise to product development. They have the technical know-how to identify bugs and other potential flaws, using these insights to correct issues in collaboration with engineering and software development teams. The technical product manager is usually the team member who can explain the feasibility or infeasibility of new product design elements.
Product Manager vs. Product Owner
A product manager establishes product concepts and sets goals to help bring these plans to fruition. Working in product management has more outward-facing duties, as these professionals liaise with marketing and sales teams, manage budgets and focus on the business aspects of development.
On the other hand, product owners handle the ensuing execution. They implement product managers’ vision through collaboration with developers and other internal stakeholders. Product owner is a title with roots in Scrum, a framework for project management that emphasizes teamwork, speed and flexibility.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Product Management
What are the three major areas of product management?
The three major areas of product management are discovery, planning and development. These three pillars compose an industry-wide template, used as a practical aid for defining roles and responsibilities among products’ stakeholders.
What is the role of a product manager?
Product managers direct product development from beginning to end. Duties include assessing the performance of competing products in the market and taking responsibility for new products’ design and build phases to ensure all specified features and functions work properly. Subsequent tasks like product marketing and launch also fall within product managers’ purview.
