Product management is the ongoing tasks that include a variety of planned duties and responsibilities of a company that deals with each step of the product’s lifecycle. The lifecycle comprises development to planning, quality, and pricing of the product, focusing on the customer first and foremost. Launching it and marketing the product in the competitive market is the ultimate reason why product management is essential for business growth.
What is Product Management?
Product Management is essential to delivering innovations and improving business growth to make it market demanding. It is an organizational function that deals with product growth, which includes lots of factors to develop a lifelong image of the product in the market.
It is perfect for an entrepreneurial individual to involve in activities of product management to drive product development, with continuous support and improvement to achieve perfection and cut down the gap.
Product Management Lifecycle
The systematic method in managing and handling the steps of changes in which a product undergoes from its development and introduction to its growth in the market, which includes the ultimate retirement of the product is called Product Lifeline Management.
Effective product lifecycle management gathers many companies, their departments and, their employees involves the ultimate goal of the product to make it distinguish among competitors with high profit and to make it rise and shine in the market.
The handling and managing of products involve two steps; manufacturing and marketing of the products. The concept behind product lifecycle management is to help the business in deciding pricing and promotions to cost-cutting. It assists the companies in coping up with the competitor and challenges that they have to face in introducing and developing a new product.
Product Management Tools
It has now become compulsory and essential for the product managers to use tools in this current competitive scenario of the market and to add efficiency to the product management process. A product manager has to manage the work related to the product that daily requires the following tools.
- Creating roadmaps of ideas and facilities (such as product plan)
- Providing customer survey tools to help them in finding solutions(such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform)
- Optimizing the project management tools (such as Jira, Pivotal Tracker, or Trello)
- Enabling feature flagging software (such as splits.io or LaunchDarkly)
- Providing user tracking and analysis tools (such as Pendo and amplitude)
Agile Product Management
Agile product management is an idea to set some tasks and strategies to put the development on work. The vision of the product to give the right direction is the foremost importance in agile product management. It provides a product roadmap to create and deliver valuable products to stakeholders. Agile product management always prioritized the product lifecycle comprises introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. It provides strategic context to keep the developers up to date about the work they are doing on the most valuable aspect of the problem.
Product Management Software
Product management software is a handy organizational tool that is used to shape and strengthen the business’s products quickly with efficiency. This tool efficiently allows product managers and their teams to gather more data that includes new ideas and layout a blueprint to convert the business ideas into a finished product.
What is the Role of Product Manager?
The main role of the Product Manager is to make sure of the success, of a specific product and lead the cross-functional team into working and improving on that product. It helps to strategize the product and bases a plan on it through strategy and maps. Also, this role is pretty vast and includes niche specializing responsibilities such as marketing, forecasting, Profit, and Loss (P&L). It can also be said that the role of a product manager is similar to a brand manager who works at a consumer-packaged-goods company. They both take an overview of the current market and the competitors through which they help set a plan and a vision to deliver unique value based on customer demands. This role keeps a bridge to many other activities such as strategical or tactical leadership roles. The Product Manager also creates strategies while working with stakeholders and his team throughout the production. One of the most important tasks of the Product Manager is to understand the requirement of stakeholders and then share their knowledge accordingly about product consumption in the market, whether the product is in demand or not. The Product Manager should also share his/her knowledge of how that product can more improve by adding more qualities into it.
How Do You Become a Product Manager?
There are three steps to become a product manager:
- Should secure the three skills needed to become an irreplaceable product manager
- Should get the product experience and work on 3+ products
- Should be able to innovate and create a digital brand by creating an online product portfolio and updating your resume + LinkedIn
So how do you acquire product management skills? Here are 3 common ways:
- Specialized product management training
- Passionate knowledge, to adjust various stakeholders around their vision of the current item
- Learn on the job
What is a Good Product Manager?
Product Manager should have the following characteristics:
The Ability to Prioritize
Prioritization always comes first in the matter of being a product manager. When you are in charge of the team, there are different duties and responsibilities to prioritize the work and the team members according to the capabilities and workload. The best product manager must possess the following characteristic to become the best.
Good Communication Skills
Communication skill— one of the major tasks of a product manager to handle the team members and the rest of the activities related to the product’s growth effectively and properly. It’s the product manager’s job to look into the matter of any means of communication such as regarding the product, services, any question related to changes or any kind of status update will go through them. They take the information and spread it throughout the team.
Excellent Organization
Much like having good communication skill, a Product manager also have an excellent organizing skill at an expert level. It’s their job to know who is working on what and keep in check about the work they are accomplishing for the team. A Product manager possessing excellent organizing skills will make the team go to the maximum possible height together in the market as it will give courage to the team members to speak up when they need help.
Strategic Sensibilities
A good product manager should have strategic sensibilities, as it is the foremost important for the growth of the product in the market among the competitors.
The Ability to Delegate Effectively
As a product manager, a person should have the trait of delegating responsibilities effectively because it is important for the growth of the product in the market. The Product Manager is a leader that can empower the team, builds trust, and helps in the development and growth of not only the team but the product too. Delegation skill helps in identifying who is best in the team and can tackle tasks or meetings.