The basis of every successful product lies in the ability of the team behind it to produce something that resonates with customer pain points and solves an acute need. Most times we chalk it up to the engineers, who perform a very important role, while underestimating the efforts to coordinate all team efforts and activities by the project manager.
THE NUTSHELL
Product management is often considered a blend of business, technology and UI/UX design. What it aims to do is to create the best product for target markets and deliver maximum satisfaction to purchasers. This is possible by certain steps used to develop the product holistically. The best products on the market have effective product managers who go the extra mile to understand what customers want and need, and can pull together the best collaborations on their teams.
What Matters
What skills does one need to be an effective product manager?
Good communicator
Communication with stakeholders is important as a product manager. The ability to convey thoughts and desires and lay them bare is a good skill and one that can be learned.
Understanding of team dynamics
Good product development occurs when the team knows what they are doing and how to do it. Knowing the way a team should work together and designating value to add on is a requisite for product managers willing to have all gears in their development team working.
Good management skills
Management of resources and knowledge are good skills to have. Product managers must be ready to know what tools to use and how and why to deliver quality products.
Knowledge of product development
It is always a good idea for a product manager to know what it takes to build their product and have something to pitch in. The task is more than overseeing but involves getting one's hands dirty. A good way to realistically work with a team is to know what it is the different collaborating teams do.
Project management techniques
Product managers are a bit of project managers and make use of project management methodologies such as waterfall and agile to deliver and structure teams and their activities.
The Nitty Gritty
As a product manager, gathering both competitor and market research, and analyzing it is vital to giving one's team the best data-driven insights. Various survey methods such as focus groups are used to capture the mood, so to speak, and get user personas. From there, product managers can look at designing and prototyping the product, creating documents for the product requirements and roadmapping how to get there and in what time frame.
Developing successful products involves management and highly functional collaboration of teams from engineering, design, legal, technical support and others. Strategizing how these teams come together is another aspect of it.
All this is important for stakeholders, and the team. However, these things are not done magically. They are done with the tools of product management used to collaborate with business modeling, monitoring analytics, business intelligence, testing, documenting, prototyping and workflow management. Project management methods come into play when these tools need to be implemented to get the best out of it.
A frequent part of managing products is the testing before release. Testing is a vital part of the process as it causes iterations that build up to rollout or that cause optimization.
In parting
The skills and tools of a project manager are what bring about successful product releases. A deeper look into how each of these points works can help expatiate the true influence of product managers.