Grandma: I am a product manager
What is a product manager? That is the first question you get when you start talking about what you do to your family and friends. Depending of where you live “Product manager” is not a common job and it is often confused with Project manager. [not a google search]. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of different definitions in the industry and that product managers do different things in different companies.
For all of this I decided to write a post to explain what I do in a way anybody can understand.
Companies build things to offer to their customers. A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. This could be a rough definition of product. There are physical products like:
- A car
- An iPhone
- A TV
And intangible products like:
- A haircut
- A Netflix subscription
- Medium
With physical products you can make changes with each version, maybe once a year, with digital products like medium or twitter you can have a new version every 24 hours but, what should you change ?
Products & decisions
Companies make a lot of decisions to build those products and to improve each version.
The job of a product manager is to be sure the company is making the best decisions to change the product in a way that will be more valuable to its customers.
How can someone be sure that their changes are the best ones you can introduce?
The fact is that you can’t be sure that your changes are introducing value but you have to make bets.
How do you know where to bet ?
Knowing your customers: If you know your customers, their lives, their routines and their problems you can use this information to make your product more valuable to them in their context.
Measure what customers do: If you measure what your existing customers do (How many times they use your product, how much time they use it for, etc.) you can use that information to identify behaviors and weak spots in your product.
The team making the product: The people building the product often have ideas of how it would be more useful to the clients. They can give you information about time and resources required to make certain changes.
Make experiments: Sometimes the best way to learn is to build a small version of what you think and test it with real users to see their reactions.
A good product manager gathers information from all this sources and probably some others, with that information it is easier to make decisions of what to change. Since doing all the changes to the product at the same time would be costly and risky you also have to be good at prioritization.
Once you know what you want to change, you need a team to build the product and you can’t impose your decisions on the team (for a lot of reasons), you have to convince them. A better way to do that is to have a great decision making process, a process that gathers data and involves the people in the team.
Products & value
Receiving value from the customers is also part of your job. You have to figure out what other things you can add to the product to get more money from the users, and how to make them use your product more times and for longer periods. The most important thing for a product manager is to maintain a balance between the value you are giving to the user and the value you are receiving from them. It is not ethical to make a user addicted to your product to earn more money. You have to consider the consequences of your product once it is in the user’s hands, now more than ever when some product get billions of users (FaceBook, WeChat, etc).
After the product changes you need to see if you are bringing more value or value to more people.
It is a process that never stops because your customers change, your competitors change, technology changes, the world changes. Adaptation is the key to survival, not only for living creatures but also for companies.
Maybe it sounds like a difficult job, but it is also very rewarding to improve people’s lives, even if it is a tiny bit.
You can read more about what it means to be a product manager here:
From other authors
By Josh Elman
By Brandon Chu
This one shows that defining product management is not that easy(even with venn diagrams)
