The Art of Product Management

A great product manager is similar to a conductor conducting a symphony. The conductor may not be the best in composing or playing an instrument but it is the conductor, who melds all the components together to produce a perfect show. Similarly, a successful product requires a product manager with expertise across project management, engineering development, UX design, understanding of architectural concepts and product marketing fundamentals such as pricing, sales channels, go-to-market strategy and building the right collateral to highlight product strengths, act as both sales and customer success representative of the product, create a financial business plan and finally deliver a profitable P&L for the product.

At the highest level, a seasoned product manager articulates the product vision, defines the product strategy, builds a product roadmap, specifies a clear go-to-market strategy and produces a thorough and clear product requirement document (PRD) by taking inputs from customers and other internal stakeholders.

The Art of product management requires

  • listening to all stakeholders to write the product requirements, user stories and the acceptance criteria in the simplest of language. This allows the UX team to understand the usability, engineering teams to understand functionality, scalability, and availability, and QA teams to create automated test cases to build a great product and making each stakeholder feel that the product is designed specifically for them.
  • envisioning and shape the end product. Since product management is empowered with the awesome privilege to see the big picture across all stakeholders, it is the key to master the art of product management.
  • innovating if not “inventing”. Find a unique way to solve a given problem in the most elegant way. Get inspired by either looking at competition and build a unique adaptation of the solution or look for a solution in a different walk of life or solve the problem by looking at it from a completely different set of assumptions.
  • prioritizing the list of feature delivery to provide the best ROI on company resources, move the product in the right direction and keep all customers and stakeholders happy and engaged.
  • managing the process to provide a robust, intuitive and easy-to-use product to the end-user on a schedule.