Product management is an organisational role that prioritises the needs of the product and its users at all stages of the product lifecycle, from creation to positioning and price. [atlassian.com] Product managers ensure that consumers’ voices are heard and taken into consideration inside the company in order to develop the greatest possible product. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
Product teams often provide higher-performing and better-designed products as a result of this customer-focused approach. [atlassian.com] An in-depth knowledge of clients and the capacity to develop solutions specifically for them are more important than ever in the IT industry, where established goods are swiftly replaced by newer and better alternatives. Product management can help with it.
I interview hundreds of product managers about their duties and responsibilities in addition to working with them on a daily basis as a member of a product team. I’ve discovered that there are many approaches to applying product management concepts, even with the guidance provided here. Every product has different objectives and difficulties, necessitating a special and tailored approach to product management. Product management, according to the renowned definition by Martin Eriksson, is the nexus of business, user experience, and technology. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
Business: By fostering communication between development, design, [atlassian.com] the business, and the consumer, product management assists teams in achieving their goals.
Product management, or UX, is concerned with the user experience and serves as the internal consumer advocate for the company. This emphasis shows up as excellent UX. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
Technology: Every day, the engineering department handles product management. It is essential to have a solid grasp of computer science.
Every PM also has to be skilled in marketing, empathy, and narrative.
Narrative
A product leader’s preferred tool should be storytelling, and they should be as tactical as they are inspiring. Product managers have a deeper understanding of the consumer than sales representatives do via doing market research and customer interviews. They then communicate that viewpoint to the rest of the organisation using their storytelling abilities. [atlassian.com]
Promotion
Marketing initiatives are also guided by the customer emphasis of product management. Rather than adhering to the brand and using conventional methods, product management teams—which often include Product Marketing Managers—incorporate consumer language into their product’s marketing. Long-term benefits can result from understanding the competitive environment and having the capacity to stand out and distinguish. Product managers will be able to ship items that consumers can locate and connect to if they have a rudimentary understanding of positioning and marketing ideas. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
Compassion
Product management ultimately boils down to empathy: empathy for the client and their problems, sensitivity for the developers and their workflow, and even empathy for senior management, [atlassian.com] who must balance unrealistic deadlines and ambitious targets. The ability to empathise, which is acquired from deep immersion and comprehension of every group and stakeholder, distinguishes the product teams capable of uniting the organisation behind shared objectives from those that cannot.
Product Management’s Past
During the Great Depression, a 27-year-old marketer came up with the concept of a “brand man”—an employee who would oversee a particular product rather than fulfilling a regular company position. This is how product management got its start. The sustained effectiveness of this role has resulted in the expansion of product organisations across regions and sectors since the 1930s.
Proctor & Gamble marketing manager Neil H. McElroy drafts a 300-page report in 1931 outlining the necessity for “brand men,” or those who oversee certain brands.
In the late 1930s, McElroy serves as a mentor at Stanford University, where he has an impact on David Packard and Bill Hewlett, two young visionaries.
1943–1993: Hewlett-Packard maintains a 20% annual growth rate for 50 years by instilling the “brand man” concept in their new business.
Toyota develops JIT production methods in the late 1940s; Hewlett-Packard eventually adopts them.
Toyota creates the kanban technique in 1953.
1970s: American tech businesses begin creating lighter procedures in contrast to heavy procedures that came from the industrial sectors.
1980s: A lot of software and technology organisations start using agile procedures and accepting “brand management” positions.
2001 saw the creation of The Agile Manifesto, which largely dismantled departmental silos and antiquated procedures to create space for a single product management position. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
The contribution of agile software development to the expansion of product management is difficult to overstate. One of the twelve tenets of the 2001 Agile Manifesto is, “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” Product managers took on this responsibility, and as agile grew, so did product management. Technology businesses’ current need for qualified “product people” has sparked an explosion of new programmes at universities and coding schools, which will further drive this expansion.
Product Manager and Other Product Management Positions
A single product manager may be in charge of the product management of a single product or family of goods in certain situations. This person must demonstrate a strong grasp of at least one product management-related subject and a love or fluency in the others. The two most common ways this shows up are either a technical development leader who is so knowledgeable about the product that they can start driving its creation, or an experienced business marketer who is passionate about providing exceptional user experience and who speaks fluent tech terminology. [atlassian.com] Product managers now earn the highest salary in the whole IT industry since these individuals have proved to be so useful and uncommon. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
Product management is often implemented by a small team of experts since it is very difficult to locate people who are proficient in both disciplines. At Atlassian, [atlassian.com] we’ve established the “triad,” in which a product strategy leader collaborates with a leader from the business, design, and development departments. The following jobs, in addition to PMs and PMMs, support the triad:
Chief Product Officer (CPO): Oversees the organisational product function. guarantees that each product is handled by knowledgeable PMs and their teams.
Product Owner: Manages the backlog of the engineering team and their interactions with other stakeholders, taking a more hands-on approach to the product’s development.
Product Marketing Manager (PMM): By creating marketing campaigns that are specifically customised to a product and offering insightful feedback, PMMs help product teams better reach and engage consumers.
User Experience (UX) Researcher: While studying user behaviour and making suggestions for usability is one of a PM’s primary duties, having a dedicated UX researcher on staff is a wonderful asset to any product team.
Since there is no easy path to become a product manager, many motivated candidates instead concentrate on the essential skills required for the position. For instance, I attended the University of Colorado, Boulder and studied “Information Management,” a brand-new degree. I split my studies between computer science and business management in an attempt to become bilingual and close the communication gap between the two areas. Project management, strategy, [atlassian.com] and data analysis (particularly SQL) are comparable competencies to take into account. Product management is here to stay, as shown by the fact that coding schools, colleges, and professional development boot camps aggressively promote these abilities all around the globe.
Agile product management: what is it?
Product management in agile software development refers to leading a product through many iterations. Agile product management is a more flexible strategy since agile programmes are more adaptable than conventional methods.
One of the fundamental tenets of agile is that resources remain constant while project scope is flexible. As a result, the team using agile product management is flexible and spends less time defining the product up front. One iteration at a time, the product is assembled, with team retrospectives and consumer data guiding the subsequent phase. Agile product management, then, is primarily concerned with leading the development team through cycles while upholding the product vision and incorporating user feedback.
For this reason, agile product managers are more likely to be part of development teams than business teams. Our PMs at Atlassian are firmly positioned inside the engineering department and prioritise supporting the development teams. [atlassian.com] This is essential to Atlassian’s agile methodology. To complete the product discipline and firmly establish the PMs’ practice in market data and business goals, management teams and PMMs (Product Marketing Managers) provide assistance to the PMs. Although it serves Atlassian well, this organisation is not all-inclusive. Quite a few teams could succeed by doing the exact opposite.
Looking Ahead for Product Management
Product management is a diverse field that is both very easy and very elusive. Product managers learn to understand their customers’ demands and convey them to the rest of the company. Although they collaborate most closely with development teams, they also need support from management, [atlassian.com] marketing, and design. Their capacity to comprehend and converse with a diverse range of individuals who speak various languages is what makes them unique. {www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management}
I hope that there will be fewer product managers that excel in their roles in the future. Suddenly, every product required a PM, and every PM needed a PO, who in turn needed a PMM, [atlassian.com] all under the supervision of a CPO, as agile product management gained popularity. More procedure has been added than progress due to this proliferation, which has resulted in mushy, overlapping responsibilities.
The future of product management is, in fact, in their hands. While you are welcome to draw inspiration from these articles, we really hope you will use these teachings in your own unique way. Moving forward!