What is Product Management?
“The job of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible,” says Marty Cagan, Founding Partner of Silicon Valley Product Group and a 30-year veteran of product management. Similarly, our own Martin Eriksson calls product management the intersection between business, user experience, and technology (only a product manager would define themselves in a Venn diagram!). Product Management is about bringing together those functions and more to build value for the customers and the business.
Read on to learn more about what product management is, how the product manager job works, and what you need to do to become a top product management practitioner and build products people love.
FEATURED CONTENT
LATEST POSTS
Using Pricing to Inform Your Roadmap
We often think of pricing as something to do right before launching a new product. Maybe it gets a little thought during development, but it isn’t urgent. Now that we’re approaching launch though, we need a price. Or, sometimes we schedule a pricing meeting to decide whether to change our existing price or, albeit rarely, Read more »
Three Ways of Generating Trust for Your Product
Sign up for our product! Tell us about yourself. Fill out your profile. Tell us where you’re going so we can bring you a driver. Let us see your bank transaction data so we can give you financial recommendations. Every time you ask your users for information, they’re going to ask why they should trust Read more »
How product managers can make meetings great again
It’s become a common trope that product management is less about the management of products and more directly about the management of stakeholder relations. To that end, meetings would seem like an ideal use of time, enabling product managers to communicate with key members of the team. But as most readers know, that’s rarely the Read more »
Five Reasons Not to Trust Your Analytics Data
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate of data-driven decisions and I prefer my opinions and ideas to be grounded in a robust number backed case. I can have jubilatory moments when analysing figures and seeing the positive impact of what I do, as a product manager. This is also why I continue working out Read more »
Idea clustering: the wisdom of crowds, or reversion to mediocrity?
When you’re looking for new ideas, look beyond yourself. Collaboration and teamwork is a great way to generate new ideas. A popular way to do this is to brainstorm ideas, then aggregate them. Write a thought, whatever comes into your head, put it on a Post-It note. Now, stop. Let’s put them all together on Read more »
Product Rockstars have Head, Hands, and Heart
Every time you look behind a truly great product, you find people. The individuals who have created paradigm shifting, legacy leaving products are distinguished not merely by what they’ve done, but also by who they are. Take a famous example. Thomas Edison pioneered the lightbulb, one of the greatest products of all time. He wasn’t Read more »
Becoming an Industry-Agnostic Product Manager
General Skills As a product manager, you are at the epicentre of the wider product team, the glue holding all the pieces together. What I’ve realised in my years of managing product across multiple sectors is that this role does not deviate or change significantly, regardless of industry, whatever product you produce, or for whatever Read more »
Why Writers Should Manage Your Tech Projects
Product managers usually begin their career by doing something else. Interview a dozen candidates to tend to your tech product and you’ll meet former coders, UX designers and marketers. You won’t meet a single writer, and that’s a glaring omission because I think writers make killer product managers. Let me count the ways… Reason Read more »
User personas: don't let them die...
Could you deliver great software without user personas? Possibly. Especially if you are the user of your own system. Having easy access to users or customers is not the luxury of many of us however. In most cases, these people are remote and distributed across large areas or even time zones. Not knowing who the Read more »
Product, management, and communication by Andreas Thorsheim
In an inspiring ProductTank talk, Andreas Thorsheim, Founder and CEO at Otovo talks about information gathering and synthesis in relation to the product manager role, middle management, and stakeholder communication management. Read more »