Product Management

1. What is Product
Management?
Product management is the job of looking after a
specific product within a business.
It’s a role at the very heart of an organization
that needs to balance the need to deliver value to
your company (usually profit) with what customers
want and what’s technically and operationally
possible.
That means coming up with a product strategy,
thinking about what to build (Product
Development), and working out how to market
and sell the product (Product Marketing).

2. Product management is a practice
that a company adopts to oversee a
product’s development and eventual
launch. As a comprehensive field of
management, product managers are
responsible for the following
disciplines:
 Product Development
 Product Planning
 Customer Research
 Product Forecasting
 Product Pricing
 Product Launch
 Product Marketing

3. Product Life- Cycle
A product life cycle is the length of time from a product first being introduced to consumers until
it is removed from the market. A product's life cycle is usually broken down into four stages;
introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

4. Why Is Product
Management Important?
Product managers play a key role in
launching new products and experiences
for users. They serve at the intersection of
UX or user experience teams, engineering
teams, and business leaders, and they
provide the glue that holds the shared
product vision across these groups
together.

5. Types Of Product Management Roles
Some common types of specialized product management roles you’ll see are:

6. Growth Product
Manager
A growth product manager is
primarily focused on furthering a
specific metric their company has
set to measure the growth of their
business. Typically, growth PMs work
closely with product marketing and
traditional marketing teams in order
to ensure their initiatives are
expanding their product reach.

7. Technical
Product
Manager
A background in engineering or
development is almost always required
for technical product management roles,
as this type of PM works hand in hand
with engineering teams to improve
things like a product’s core functionality
or a company’s tech stack, security, or
other parts of their digital
infrastructure.

8. Data Product Manager
If you love working with numbers or were a math
wiz in school, then a data product management
role could be a great fit. Working with business
analytics teams and data scientists, data PMs
create use cases that organizations use to measure
success for their new product and feature
releases.
Often they are responsible for ensuring that
customer interactions are tracked properly across
the product interface, so that other PMs or
stakeholders can gain valuable insights into how
users are navigating the product.

9. Key aims of product management
What are the key aims
of product management?
The 3 fundamental aims
of product management
are:
1. Build once, sell many times –
this gets the economies of scale
that result in higher profitability
2. Being an expert on
the market as well as
the product – this makes
sure you build products
that customers will buy
3. Lead within the
business – with a
balanced view across all
the different aspects of
the product
If you are new to product
management, our course Product
Marketing and Product
Management for technology-based
products will teach you everything
you need to hit the ground running.
You might also be
interested in our white
paper – Product
Management as a
leadership role.

11. Difference between Project Management & Product
Management
Product managers and project
managers often work together, they
have distinct roles. While a product
manager sets the vision, goals, and
business trajectory of a product, a
project manager leads the many
projects to make those goals a
reality.

12. What is Agile Product Management?
Agile product management is
an approach that describes
how teams create product
strategies and product
roadmaps in Agile companies.
An agile organisation is a
company that responds
quickly to changes in the
marketplace and workplace
trends. Such companies are
aware that organisational
change is inevitable and so
regularly examine their
practices and processes to
ensure they are conducive to
optimal employee
engagement, morale and
performance.
Agile organizations like Gore,
ING, and Spotify focus on
several elements: Implement
clear, flat structures that
reflect and support the way in
which the organization
creates value. For example,
teams can be clustered into
focused performance groups

13. Who is a Product
Manager?
Product managers are at the
center of the product
development team. They are
responsible for finalizing the
product vision and making sure
that everyone involved stays
true to it throughout the
entirety of the product
roadmap.

14. Product
Management
Responsibilities
Product Manager roles are now more diverse than
ever in terms of specific responsibilities.
Here are some of the main responsibilities of a
product manager.
1. Customer Research
Detailed customer research is the cornerstone of any
good product strategy. As a product manager, your job
is to lead the product management team’s research
efforts in order to uncover useful insight that will help
to craft a solid product strategy.

15. Some product
managers also combine
buyer personas with
other tools to gain an
even greater
understanding of their
product users.

16. Developing
Product Strategy &
Roadmap

All of your product management efforts will be null and
void if you do not base them on a product strategy.
A strong product strategy involves developing a concise
product vision that articulates the goal you hope your
product will achieve. In doing so, the product strategy must
aim to position the product in its target market in such a way
that it maximizes its chances for success.
As a result, product managers anchor their respective
strategies around addressing customer pain points by
providing clear value to their target market.

17. Coordinating
Product
Development
In product development, the product team will
design, prototype, and build the product. In most
organizations, the product manager will not be
the one who does the hard labor in the design or
development process. For that, a product manager
relies on the help of UX designers, graphic
designers, and software developers who will put in
the hard work for them. Instead, the product
manager has to coordinate all of the teams
involved in product development to ensure that
they are all working in an optimal fashion to meet
the product goals.

18. Analyzing
Customer and
Market Data
Once the product manager has launched the
product, the time has come to analyze all new
product data that comes in. On one hand, this
will include data regarding the product’s
performance over a given period of time. On
the other hand, it will also involve analyzing
customer feedback and other product user
data that will help the product team to
improve upon their creation.