Role Of Product Manager: A Comprehensive Guide (2021)

Introduction

If you are not from a software management background, it is highly probable that you have no idea whatsoever about the role of product manager and what it refers to. However, if you are pushing your way into product management in the tech industry or just want a better idea of its responsibilities, knowing all about what does a product manager does is certainly important, and that is what this article seeks to achieve. Read on to explore the various aspects of product manager responsibilities and better understand what it means in this what is product manager article.

In this article let us look into:

1. What does a Product Manager do?
2. Role of Product Manager
3. Responsibility of Product Manager
4. Critical Skills for Product Managers

1. What does a Product Manager do?

To know what is the role of a product manager, one must be well-informed about the term of Product manager itself. To understand what is product manager, one must keep in mind the simple phrase, delivering a differentiated product to market which delivers a market need and signifies a feasible business opportunity. A key responsibility of the Product Manager position is ensuring that the product supports the company’s overall goals and strategy.

One can also product manager’s responsibility as a process where the Product Manager is eventually responsible for manage and supervise the product and its development throughout its process. The Product Manager is eventually responsible for managing and supervise the product and its development throughout its process. They get support throughout the whole process from specialists such as developers, designers, supply chain, quality assurance engineers, and manufacturing engineers, operations experts, project managers, sales professionals, product marketing managers, and more.

2. Role of Product Manager

To understand who is a product manager one can simply look at it as an intersection between business, technology, and user experience. The term Product Manager was coined in 1931 with a memo written by Neil H. McElroy representing PM as Brand Men at Procter & Gamble.

To understand what is product manager interpretation, one can refer to what is represented in the history– as responsibility for a brand or product from tracking the sales to managing the product development process, promotions, and advertising as well as thorough field testing and client interaction. As a product manager, it is essential to understand that you are a core within the company for any crucial information about the products, market, customers, competitors, key industry analysts, prospects, and other areas.

Some of the main functions of the Product Manager are: 

1. Managing a product from its initial stage- from concept to design, prototype production, analysis, tests, forecast, the estimated cost, its mass production, marketing/sales, support, and till the end.
2. Product manager responsibilities Include delivering the plan of achieving the growth, objectives like revenue, profit, market share, and returns for all the categories of business and customers.
3. A Product Manager is responsible for doing thorough research, strategic planning, and implementation to manage and execute marketing activities for the product in the final stage.

3. Responsibility of Product Manager

To succeed as a Product Manager, you will need to constantly gather and analyze data from all of the source teams as well as your sales and customer service to create your roadmap strategy to efficiently deliver the product. Some of the essential product manager roles and responsibilities are:

A) Prioritization and roadmap process

As a Product Manager, you will always have to explain “Why” to the various stakeholders, developers, and constituents. Why you have taken such initiatives, decision and prioritize one process or feature. The best way to achieve a better roadmap is by being in tune with the sales, marketing, developers and executives, and their strategies in order to make a clear and strategic decision.

B) Data Analysis and Documentation

Data is essential to make better product decisions so a Product Manager should always be able to understand and pull out the data they need to run analyses. Excel and SQL are a perfect option to run simple data analysis. And, if you do not comprehend the data, you’ll find yourself struggling to identify what business value the product is going to make. Just like that, documentation is also a core component of the process. Gathering essential data from various teams and summarizing it, prioritizing the tasks, while properly delivering the most important details to the stakeholders is crucial for this role.

C) Prioritize

Irrespective of the size of the company or budget, there will always be some challenges such as limited resources for the development, which means you will always need to prioritize, and constantly evaluate the challenging factors between your goals for the products, limited resources of the company, as well as demands from the stakeholders.

4. Critical Skills for Product Managers

The role of a product manager in marketing can be overwhelming, but if you build these three core skills, you can surely thrive as an excellent product manager while confronting the enormous workload of product management:

• Have compassion and good communication skills
• Determination and speed of learning
• Ruthless prioritization

Conclusion

What is a Product Manager can also be understood in more detail with this simple example? Three are three types of groups of people in the world. One is customer-who is willing to spend money, time, or both to have their needs addressed. The second is business- which is a group that is focused on sustainably providing benefit to investors in the long run. They seek out to monetize products and services so that it can hire people and create a fortune for their proprietors. The third one includes development team—which consists of tech engineers, developers, and designers who want to create products that the customer find meaningful while ensuring that it is sustainable and manageable over the long run.

The product manager a central role, as a link between the customer, business, and development team. Product Manager strategist and evangelist manages the product development as per the customer’s need while keeping it sustainable and profitable for the organization, and ensures the shortcomings, the backlog is effectively addressed. As a Product Manager, your role will always be linked to your goal achievement and the success of your product.

Interested to learn all about Product Management from the best minds in the industry? Check out our Product Management Course. This 6-month-long program takes place online through live instructor-led sessions. It is the only program in India that offers the ‘Bring Your Own Product (BYOP)’ feature so that learners can build their product idea into a full-blown product, and go through an entire Product Development lifecycle. Not only this, but this is the only program in India with a curriculum that conforms to the 5i Framework. Post completion, learners receive a joint certification from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and Jigsaw Academy.