What is a product manager?

What is the position of product manager? What is his main responsibility? A new product manager or even a Senior Product Manager may be confused about the position. Martin Eriksson, Senior Product Manager and chief product officer of covestor, an online investment management company, published an article titled what, exactly, is a product manager? It provides your own understanding of the position of product manager. The translation is as follows:

I often ask what a product manager is and what their responsibilities are? How should we train product managers?

Marty Cagan's book titled 'product manager' (the Chinese name "revelation") has described this position as "Product Manager" to discover valuable, available, and reasonable products. Similarly, I think product managers are the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. A good product manager must have at least one of the professional experience, enthusiasm for all three positions, and good friendship with practitioners in three occupations.

Business:The product manager is a business position first. His main responsibility is to maximize the commercial value of the product. Product managers should focus on product optimization to achieve business goals and achieve maximum ROI.

Technology:If the product manager does not know how to build a product, it makes no sense to define the product. This does not require the product manager to write code, but understanding the technology, the most important thing is to clearly understand the direction of effort for making the right decision is crucial. This is more important in Agile development because the product manager is the one who spends the most time with the development team.

User Experience:This is the last but equally important item. The product manager represents the user voice in the company. He must pay attention to the user experience of the product. This requires the product manager to jump out of the team, test the product as a user, talk to the user, and obtain first-hand feedback, especially the product manager of a startup company.

What is the responsibility of the product manager?

Why do product managers need to master so many skills? Because this role is too broad and varied, product managers use these skills every day.

First, you must set a goal for the product. This requires you to conduct repeated research on the market, customers, and the problems you are trying to solve. You must be able to digest the vast amount of information-quantitative data, research reports, market trends, and statistics produced by customer feedback, website analysis-you must understand the product market and all the customer's information, use innovative thinking to integrate all information to help define the product to be developed.

Once the product definition is determined, you need to publicize it in the team quickly. If the business team and development team have no enthusiasm for the product, it means that your definition of the product is not successful, because the success of you and the product depends on the understanding of the definition of each member of the team, at least a little passionate about it.

Then, start the project. First, you must develop a feasible plan. Gradually improving the line chart and iterative development methods can help you gradually achieve the final product goal. At this time, your team will devote all their efforts to better design, better coding, and better solutions for customers.

As the product owner, we should face it carefully in the days that we will work with the development team in the next day. Constantly define and iterate products; resolve problems as soon as they arise; manage transactions more closely to ensure timely completion of the product.

After the product is finally made, it takes several days to focus on data again-observe how users use the product, go out and talk to users about the product, and always pay attention to the product. Is the product correct? Does the user have this product? Are they willing to pay for this product?

Then re-design the new product according to the same process. This is not a waterfall development process-you are not doing a product step by step, but preparing for many features of multiple products and products at one time, turning the strategy into Tactics in an instant.

It sounds tough?

It is indeed a hard job, but it also contains a lot of fun and achievements. You have defined the essential attributes of the product, designed solutions for the customer's problems, worked with all the team members, and played an important role in the product success process. We are the unsung hero in the technology world-at least we like to think so ......

Original article: what, exactly, is a product manager?

What is a product manager?