Product Manager or Unicorn? Defining the PM role for Hiring & Career Development
•
1 like•215 views
This workshop was presented at ProductCamp Silicon Valley on 31 March 2018 by Jessica Sweeney & Vicky Nguyen. The role of the Product Manager is defined differently at every company. Job descriptions with the same title can have nothing in common. In this interactive workshop, we discussed the variability in role definition and provided a gap analysis tool for defining your team’s hiring needs and your own strengths.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Product Manager or Unicorn? Defining the PM role for Hiring & Career Development
Similar to Product Manager or Unicorn? Defining the PM role for Hiring & Career Development (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Product Manager or Unicorn? Defining the PM role for Hiring & Career Development
- 1. Product Manager or Unicorn? Defining the Product Management role for Hiring & Career Development The Horn is to Hold All the Hats This workshop was presented at ProductCamp Silicon Valley on 31 March 2018. This content is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA
- 2. Jessica Sweeney 20+ years Product Management & Marketing B2B, IoT, & SaaS Software /jfsweeney jessica@ProductCampSD.org Vicky Nguyen 2017 graduate of Product School Social venture software, Transportation logistics, Entrepreneur in/diemvicky diemvicky@gmail.com A version of this workshop will also be presented at: Coming Autumn 2018 June 25 - 29, 2018
- 3. Narrowing in on The Right PM Role
- 4. 1)Domain Expertise 2)Technical 3)Technical enough 4)Your Complimentary Forte
- 5. You have Domain Expertise Do you already speak their language? Prove it.
- 6. What is your focus? - Enterprise - Consumer - Finance - Healthcare - Gaming - Hospitality - Dog-walking, etc.
- 7. You are Technical CS background or engineering-type background, period. Beef up other skills of PM.
- 8. You are Technical enough Have you tried coding yourself? Do you understand engineers? How quickly can you pick up technical products?
- 9. What is your forte? - Entrepreneur - Consulting - Design - Analytics - Marketing
- 10. 1)Domain Expertise 2)Technical 3)Technical enough 4)Your Complimentary Forte
- 11. Product Management Triad Director, Product Management Technical Product Manager Product Marketing Manager Strategy Marketing Technical
- 12. Agile Product Management A Product Owner is not a Product Manager Strategy Marketing Product Owner Sales Engineer
- 13. Hub-and-Spoke Product ManagerEngineering Customers UX Design Graphic Design Content Technical Writing Project Management Business Development Technical Support Investors & Board Executive Management Press & Analysts Partners Market Analysis Legal & Contracts Research The original Product Manager… a cross-functional leader coordinating between R&D, Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing, and Operations. focused on the process of understanding the customers’ needs and finding a way to fulfill those needs using the classic marketing mix – the right Product, in the right Place, at the right Price, using the right Promotion. Originated with Neil H. McElroy, Procter & Gamble Company, 1931
- 14. Product Manager Engineering Customers UX Design Graphic Design Content Technical Writing Project Management Business Development Technical Support Investors & Board Executive Management Press & Analysts Partners Market Analysis Legal & Contracts Research
- 15. Happy Hunting!
Editor's Notes
- The perfect product manager is a myth What do you have? What do you need? https://www.slideshare.net/gayle2/cracking-the-pm-interview-svcc-october-2014
- Jessica: representing the hiring manager, startups & large organizations Vicky: representing the new product managers & job hunters Getting to know our audience: How many are hiring or expect soon to hire for product managers? (Building a team.) How many are product managers who want to be hired? (Joining a team.) How many aren’t product managers now but want to become one?
- The Pragmatic Marketing Framework helps us to identify and organize the many functions of product management. It becomes clear that no one can fulfill all the functions with equal strength.
- https://pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/articles/the-strategic-role-of-product-management-when-development-goes-agile
- Product management isn’t a new role. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2015/10/history-evolution-product-management/ http://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/McElroyBrandMan.pdf Instead of the jobs to be done, we can also look at it as roles to coordinate. Good product managers do whatever needs to be done to achieve and keep product-market fit. Chief Gap Filler. Dishwasher when needed. Hybrid roles combine more than 1 skill. PM roles combine all the skills. PM Unicorn: one individual who comprises an entire product team, from research to development to strategy to launch to delivery. Other jobs you could add to the wheel: QA, hardware engineering, platform engineering, finance, information architecture, data analytics
- Three flavors of PM: engineering, business analyst, designer Transition into product management from any of: Engineer Technical support UX design or research Business analyst Sales engineer or consultant Project manager Straight from school into associate/training program
- Exercise: Think of your current team or your company. What departments exist? What roles are filled? If some of these circles are irrelevant to your business, ignore them. If key departments and roles are missing, add them. What is the depth and breadth of capability in each of the departments and roles? Make a mark along the dotted line: closer to the center more capacity to execute, further from the center, less capacity to execute. Connect the dots to see the shape of the gap you need to fill. Think of yourself as you are now in your career. What experience do you have? What skills have you learnt? Make a mark along the dotted line: closer to the center less capacity to execute, further from the center, more capacity to execute. Connect the dots to see the shape of the gap you can fill Look for the overlaps and the gaps. Where you have an overlap, you have redundant capacity and can focus product management on other areas of execution. Where you have a gap, you can focus your hiring or training.
- https://pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/articles/the-strategic-role-of-product-management-when-development-goes-agile https://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/annual-survey http://www.crackingthepminterview.com