Product Management… oh, you mean Project Management! Nope, I mean Product Management.
Let’s put an end to, at times the overly complicated answers to this question.
A little story about an incident that happened when a relative asked “so what does your daughter do in the US?”
I am originally from India and but have studied both undergrad and grad here in the Silicon Valley in the United States. Even today after being in product management for almost a decade, if anyone asked my parents (about 5 years ago)about What do I do, they’ll get a response “our daughter works in an IT company” and beyond that nothing much. :)
I find two main reasons for this —
- I come from a business family. both Maternal and paternal sides are all business owners (small or large). No one in my family has ever had a job in the Information technology field well scratch that No one in my family has actually ever had a job outside of the family business. I am the first one.
- In my parent's generation(the '60s and '70s), the most common positions (talked about in media and everywhere) were more of a general manager (GM), marketing manager, engineer, consultant, and product manager wasn’t ever heard of even if the role existed; so there is no prior reference.
Now if you want to be able to explain to your parents, relatives, or your colleagues ;)what do you as a product manager stick around
There are possibly these three reasons why you are looking to learn about product management —
● You are looking for a job change and you happen to hear a lot of buzz around product management on Linkedin, Quora, Medium. (buzz is real)
● You already work in another non-technical role and have been thinking about transitioning into product management for while and you are reading are here on medium reading this as a way of upskilling your knowledge. (welcome)
● You are a product manager and have trouble at times explaining your role to your colleagues and articulate the value you bring (yes, this is real)
Whatever your reason first thing first know that product management is not project management neither it is brand management, nor product design.
(these are the top 3 myths I get asked about here on IG). They are all very very different roles.
Product management is a role that more formally came into existence in the past decade and a half and it also more commonly exists in product-based information technology companies (mainly software). They are some hardware product manager roles but for the purpose of this post, I’ll stick to the software since that is the area I can speak to with confidence.
Quick background on me — I have worked in product both large enterprise companies as well as startups in both B2B and B2C web and mobile products in fintech and health tech for almost a decade now. So In my experience, fundamentally as a product manager, you are required to do 3 main things (everything else is a by-product and rolls up to these 3)—
- Build a business case on WHY the company should invest in build a new product or feature. What problem are you solving — business or customer?
- Sell that business case internally to your engineers, marketers, and exec management.
- After everyone is on board define the WHAT needs to be built.
And if you have done your job well up to this point your team (engineers and designers) will need only a little help from you in bringing your vision come to life.
This might read easy to do but TBH, for example, it is no easy task to “sell” your idea to your engineering team colleagues with that is the next best thing they should be working on. Engineers are very smart people and wired to always dig deeper into the root cause and ask a lot of whys…so you will have to come prepared to answer your WHY in great detail. Same with Marketing or customer success teams, they will come to you with their requests for new features that they think are needed.
As a product manager, your job is to do your research and come with well-backed data with your why when you prioritize your roadmap.
Your primary role as a product manager is to understand the problem, articulate it well and work cross-functionality across various teams to build and roll out the features or products.
If I was to explain to my parents what I do… I say I am responsible for understanding the problems of the customers who use our software as well as understand requirements from my management to grow the business. I, then work with my team to solve those problems and make better software.
Project vs Product Management
In the simplest form, Product managers are responsible for building the products working directly with the engineers and designers whereas Project managers are responsible for ensuring timely delivery of the product.
Project Managers role varies from industry to industry and also depends on what stage the company is at i.e large companies vs. startups or mid-stage etc. But overall project managers are involved throughout the project life cycle which consists of five phases (or processes):
Project/Program management is a critical role in large companies due to the scale of the projects and also a large number of teams but in smaller companies or startups product managers must manage their project timeline and communications.
The increasing demand for Product Managers
There has been a clear tendency throughout these past years of increasing demand for Product Managers.
If we go back to 2019 we were already reading articles and seeing reports like the following:
We can see that Product Management positions in the United States were growing by 32% for a period of two years, from 2017 to 2019. (Source).
As we get closer to this day we find reports like this one in which Glassdoor has found that Product Manager has taken the 4th place as the best job in the United States based on a very marked demand for this role in the U.S.
Salary scales for Product Managers in the U.S.
Based on an article from markuphero.com, we can find the following state of things regarding salaries for Product Managers in 2020 in the U.S.
I have put together a series of product manager skill set that you should build to break into the product as well as to upskill yourself as a product manager. You can check it out here.
Would love to hear your thoughts. I can be found on Linkedin here and on IG here
