Making a Career out of Product Management: Opportunities and Best Practices.
Thoughts of a newcomer to the Valley.
One of the best things of being in the Valley is the rare opportunity to interact with people, entrepreneurs who have been there/done that, on a personal level and to learn from their experiences. And in a quaint coffee shop in downtown Mountain View on a wintery March afternoon, we did just that.
Role of a Product Manager
The topic of discussion for the day was Making a Career out of Product Management: Opportunities and Best Practices. So what exactly does it mean to manage a product? Product managers are a special breed of people. Essentially, they are charged with bringing the product to life: from concept to reality. The Product Manager is intricately and intimately involved in every single detail and with that, brings with it different challenges and required skills.
Outward Looking vs Inward Looking
As product managers, one of the key challenges faced is finding a balance between the issues of dealing with external business and marketing needs and handling the engineering and creative teams. Are you a more outward looking manager that focuses heavily on the business development aspect of your product or one that builds strong relationships with the engineering team? As with many things in life, there is no best way. Product managers with different styles have succeeded in creating great products. The best product managers understand this need and embrace it completely
There’s no I in T E A M
This extremely over-used cliché rings true, especially in product management. As a product manager, you are a team leader, a consensus builder. Between the inevitable complaints from the engineers that what you want done is impossible and the requests from the marketing department for a flashier product, you need to find a middle ground. At the same time, you want to make the impossible happen: to create a product that will change the world. How exactly do you do that? Communicate, communicate, communicate. Managing your team and their expectations and most importantly, bring out the best in them. Succeeding as a team only makes success all so much sweeter.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Getting the balnce between inward and outward looking activities is critical - one way to help is to put a vlaue next to your business tasks and techincal tasks so that you can get a sence of what to do and what to leave undone. see How Product Managers can estimate business value using agile techniques
for more details.
Regads,
Derek
March 28th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Hi Derek,
I think this concept of a balance between inward and outbound functions is a indeed very crucial. Once I was presented with this idea of the Tango between Product Management and Product Marketing. I thought this framed the relationship very nicely - there has to be seamless communication and flow between the management and marketing fuctions so that the product can be built while the market is being developed. That way there is this constant feedback loop making the product more relevant and intune to the market needs.
Cheers,
Dalvir Singh, Sunny
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:54 am
O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.