What is Product Management? What are the roles and best practices for Beginners?

05 August,2022  |  By Brainwonders

Table of Blog Content

• What is Product Management?
• Product Managers Roles and Responsibilities
• How to Start a Career in Product Management?
• Product Management Best Practices to Live By

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What is Product Management?

Product management is an organisational process that includes product creation, planning, research, forecasting, pricing, and other activities that lead to a product launch and marketing. Product Managers will frequently continue to refine a product after it has been released to the market. Thus, Product management plays a very critical role in every organisation. Product Management is defined as a role within a product development team that focuses on successfully planning, developing, and executing the product life cycle. In order to perform a wide range of product development and management tasks, product managers are responsible. They perform a wide range of strategic or tactical duties and responsibilities.

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Product Managers' Duties and Responsibilities

• They are responsible for outlining a product vision and creating a stimulative strategy for bringing it to production.
• Product managers must actively coordinate with the engineering team and lead them from the starting stage to the final product release.
• Depending on the organisation, product managers need to look after the problems of the product that need to be solved in the best possible way.
• Framing different marketing and sales strategy in order to achieve the productivity of the product
• Connect with the customers to identify insights to drive variable decisions
• They need to constantly work with the design and development team to validate and execute solutions and ultimately launch a product in the market.
• Manage the product life-cycle 
• Conduct customer and market research or market survey
• Utilise time on conducting research and analytical practices in order to build creative and innovative products
• Connect with the internal product team to identify new opportunities or possibilities where a marketplace can help the customers grow better.
• Ensuring the product meets the needs of the targeted customers.
• Pitching and positioning new ideas for product feature development
• They need to constantly work on product development in order to achieve the product vision.

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How to Start a Career in Product Management?

Getting a product manager position is one thing, but how do you become a great Product Manager? In order to start, you must have the core competencies and develop a series of interpersonal skills that will help you be in the Product Manager profession in the long run.

Product Management is a career that fits into many types of backgrounds. There is no specific path to getting into a PM role, and it is an excellent career option for those who are already into technology and want to experience more in that field. 

Successful Product Managers have tailored a mix of technical knowledge and business acumen. As such, a degree in computer science or engineering and previous technical work experience is often taken or an MBA or any other Master's business degree. Here are some of the ways that will help you to get into a PM role:

However, required abilities and credentials go beyond diplomas and certificates. Product managers must be outstanding communicators since they act as a connection between so many different teams and departments. They must also be technically competent to communicate with the development team while communicating coherently with consumers and stakeholders. They must be big-picture thinkers who can balance consumer expectations with corporate demands and budgets while defining clear objectives.

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Product Management Best Practices to Live By

1. Understand Organisation Goals

How does your organisation achieve the set targets? How does the product development strategy support achieving organisational goals? Who are your ideal customers, and what does your product mean to others? It would help if you took the time to understand what your organisation wants to achieve and accordingly work on that. You must coordinate with the organisation's higher committee, stakeholders, and executives to achieve this.

2. Connecting with Customers

Current users and customers are your essential resource. You need to understand what grabs the attention of satisfied customers, and alternatively, you need to frame other product development strategies in order to achieve a massive number of customers. Many of the happy customers will be happy to tell you which features they like the most and which of the features need improvement. You can also do a short survey by targeting a few satisfied customers, interacting with them about your product, and gathering feedback.

3. Look after Sales and Support Team's Knowledge

Your sales support team is in contact with the potential customers and therefore has valuable insights into the market landscape, your product's strengths, weaknesses, and the grievance of the customers. This will help you to know what changes you need to make to the product. Constantly work on solving the common issues, complaints or problems that customers face; this will help you know which product aspect you need to prioritise.

4. Demonstrate or Use the Product

"Eat your own dog food," as the expression goes. This may sound apparent, but you must get your hands dirty and utilise your product daily. What distinguishes the trial experience from the paid product? Which features are mobile-friendly and which aren't? How user-friendly is the interface? How frequently do you come across a bug or a glitch? You should be the expert on your product.

5. Analyse other Products

Always try to be innovative and creative when it comes to the development of the product. Think about your competitors' products; what makes them so good? You need to understand their strategy and learn to analyse the product, so it will help you know which strategy you should use in your product that will catch the customers' attention. Ides and inspirations are always the best when it comes to developing new marketing strategies for your product.

6. Plan, Execute, Implement

Use all the information and insights you have collected by doing the above to define your long-term vision for the product. Then, break that vision into the implementation of developing, executing and applying the features to that product. Doing so will help you to figure out which features and aspects to prioritise in the next release. 

7. Connect with People in the Product Management Community

Connecting with senior product managers with decades of experience is a terrific way to remain up to speed on industry trends and best practices, extend your network, and learn from them. Product Management Networking Group, Product Development & Management Association on LinkedIn, the Product Management category on Quora, and the Product Manager HQ Slack community are good tools for learning and interacting with other product management professionals.

Conclusion:

Product managers live at the crossroads of technology and business leaders. They play an essential role in ensuring that new product features are a success for both their organisation and their customers. Product management could be an extremely lucrative career choice for those passionate about teamwork, strategic thinking and creating a remarkable experience for customers or users. 

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