Five Myths about Product Management
Product Management is being brought up a lot these days and it looks like it’s the new great job to have in Software, but in reality Product Management has a long history behind it, and throughout the many years that have transpired with professionals taking this position and the different approaches that each company has for their version of Product Management a lot of assumptions, opinions, observations, recurrent comments have turned into myths regarding the Product Manager role and the activities and responsibilities involved in Product Management.
# 1 - The Product Manager is the boss of the Product Owner
The best way that I know to put an end to this myth is the following: there is a standard definition in the software industry for each role, for example: Product Manager, Business Analyst, Product Owner, but we have to consider that every organization has its own needs in terms of administration and their own way of handling things. Having said that, it is very, VERY possible that you will find companies, with very huge administrative infrastructures that have defined certain hierarchies between roles that from an academic standpoint or from a strictly industry standardized based definition are not accurate but it still serves the administrative needs of these organizations.
In order to demystify this misconception, the standard way to think about a Product Manager is that he is not the boss of the Product Owner, because in an organization taking full advantage of the Product Manager role, there is no place for a Product Owner, not because they are not needed but because the Product Manager is making sure of covering all the needs that the company and the development team may have regarding business requirements, business goals and clarifications to create the desired product and achieve the business goal behind it.
The Product Owner is a role in the context of Scrum that was created by the Scrum Alliance to satisfy the need of a customer representative being part of the Scrum team with enough business knowledge and authority to provide answers, make decisions and lead the development team into the creation of the most valuable possible deliverables within an always tight schedule. Which in the end, is one of the most important responsibilities of the role we know as Product Manager.
# 2 - Product Management is the same as Project Manager, the name just varies from one company to the other
A Product Manager is not the same as Project Manager. Their focus and activities on a daily basis are supposed to be way different to get them mixed up. Still we could still find organizations making mixed uses of these role names. Regardless of the name, in those cases, the important thing is to look at which are the tasks that the organization has defined as responsibilities for a Product Manager and a Project Manager or even a Program Manager.
All these situations only respond to the need of companies to organize their roles, their career paths and the responsibilities that each member has.
Just keep in mind, Product Management, is not the same as Project or Program Manager. They are very well defined roles with specific and clear differences regarding their responsibility and what it is supposed to expect from each one of them. You can check this article for detailed description of both those roles.
# 3 - You don’t need a technical background to work as a Product Manager
This is tricky but in fact is not that complicated. The key factor is this: it doesn’t matter what your background is, to a certain extent of course, what matters is that if you want to be a Product Manager, you need to enjoy talking with professionals with very technical profiles, like Database Administrators, Solution Architects, Software Engineers, QA Engineers, UX/UI Designers and in order to have a productive interaction with all of them you need to learn some fundamentals about technical aspects.
You can check this article here for more description specifically on this.
You don’t need to have a degree in Software Engineering, but you need to put in the work in your own time, learn the basics from relational databases, SQL queries, APIs, micro services, REST architecture, a little bit of scripting just have an idea, you could take a brief course from any educational platform about an Introductory Course of Python or C# and you will notice that the development team will interact with you in a very fluent way and the environment you will be able to create with your teammates when they see that you care about their challenges and the difficulties they face and that you, at least from a high level perspective, understand what’s going on in the technical aspect of the project it only will increase your possibilities of succeeding every day with the task at hand and of course succeeding with the product being built and the business goal behind it.
# 4 - You need a technical background to work as a Product Manager
Well, this is confusing right? Although the title of the myth number 4 may look like a contradiction of the myth number 3, is in fact the exact complement. Again, there will be very technical Product Managers because they come from Software Engineer, QA Engineer, UX/UI Designer positions, etc. so they have an upper hand in terms of sharing a common background with all the members from the development team. It is true that for some very specific positions like a Platform Product Manager may be more suitable for a Product Manager with a lot of understanding of software design patterns, different architectures for API services, performance aspects, cloud computing services integration, but again, if you put in the work, and you prepare yourself for the task at hand you should be able to succeed in the development of products like Testing Automation Frameworks, Performance Testing Frameworks and things of that nature.
# 5 - The Product Manager role requires certain skills and experience… "you wouldn’t understand, may be you are not ready"
This is for those trying to land their first Product Manager position. Don’t get discouraged when going to already established Product Managers, that have around your same age, similar background and when you ask them for advice to accelerate your way up to a PM role they say things like “You need real experience with Product, you still lack commercial vision, I don’t think you have had enough practice with presentations and negotiation with stakeholders, it is difficult to explain in a few minutes, when you are ready you will know.”
In this, you just may need to trust me, a Product Manager is not the “chosen one”, is not some kind of messiah who came down to save us all from sinking projects and products that nobody wants to buy, Product Managers are people, professionals, they prepare themselves for the job and they execute, they fail, a lot, and they accept and learn from their mistakes and continue working to get the things done and business goal achieved. There’s no more than that.
Just have this in mind, if you feel you’re passionate about it, start moving, start working towards your goal, and that’s it. Polish your CV, polish your Cover letter for each position you apply, show off, and display your authentic interest in becoming a Product Manager for the company you are applying to. You will get it.