Roles of Product Managers

What Is Product Management?

Product Management is managing the process of a product throughout the lifecycle from Strategizing, design, and development, to the branding of the product.

Product management concerns:

• Creating a Product Strategy to boost the organization's proceeds 
• Adding value for the client 
• To clearly understand how to build and develop the product, and create roadmaps. Creating blueprints and describing the functional requirements  
• Development of the product in accordance with the specifications 
• It's essential to gather client input when the product is produced 
• Designating the Product Price 

Now let’s move ahead and learn Who is a Product Manager?

Who Is a Product Manager?

The Product Manager is the one who leads the team by managing the product throughout the lifecycle, from strategizing, to design and development, to the branding of the product. The product manager is the Mini CEO for the product as he leads the product within the organization.

• An essential organizational position that concentrates on a product's long-term vision is the product manager. The role concentrates on the marketplace and plans the success of a product by analyzing the market needs for the product. In order to offer clients a useful and relevant product, the product manager establishes the strategy and roadmap for the product.
• The product manager serves as a link between the company, developers, and users. Depending on their organization, they might relate to various activities. Forex: Product testing and Maintenance, Marketing and Sales, or Research and Development.
• A product manager's main objective is to acquire market requirements, plan the product only in light of those requirements, and make sure the product fulfills the demands of both the market and the customers.
• A Product Manager is someone who is responsible for bringing a helpful product that meets market demands to the market. By creating new items and enhancing old ones, this role is accountable for generating revenue for the corporation.

Product managers come in a variety of forms. Each organization has its own definition of the product manager's job description. Product managers can be distinguished based on their duties and responsibilities. So let's go and gain an understanding of the various product managers.

Roles of Product Managers

General Product Manager

The manager manages the entire product lifecycle and looks after every aspect of a product i.e. Strategizing, road mapping, development, Branding, etc., and identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.

Product Owner

As the main point of contact on the client's behalf, the product owner is the person who defines the user stories, develops the product backlog, and is responsible for other related tasks. Someone higher up in the corporate structure receives an owner report on project status. The director of product management is often the product owner's immediate supervisor. The product owner may keep management informed and the development team on schedule via this channel of communication.

Distributed Product Manager

The Manager is responsible for managing the numerous distributed models used by the Product Teams, such as B2B, B2C, and B2B2C, or Business to Business, Customer, or Business to Customer. To gather information about consumers and their preferences, product managers might host focus groups in addition to conducting surveys, interviews, and user research. However, they are not required to maintain constant contact with the clients.

Platform Product Managers

Platform product managers (PPMs) can take on a variety of responsibilities inside a company. The industry, product lines, and firm size all affect these positions differently. Since doing so strongly depends on how successfully they work with various teams, platform product managers must produce results that will help firms expand and achieve their goals. One of their primary responsibilities is managing the internal stakeholders' platforms, whether they involve online, mobile, software, or hardware. They also interact, communicate, recognize other teams, and applaud them.

Technical Product Manager

The engineering team, and internal stakeholders, such as the design team, development team, and technical leaders, are all partners with whom the product manager works. A technical product manager (PM), who often focuses on the more technical parts of the product, is a product manager with a strong technical background. A technical PM collaborates more closely with the engineering team than with the organization's business, sales, and marketing departments.

Growth Product Manager

The person who determines the company's growth possibilities and guides the team's efforts to pursue them is known as a growth product manager. To increase sales and profitability over the long term, the growth PM focuses on enhancing a certain company statistic. To move products to the next level of scale, impact, and profitability, growth product managers must oversee experimentation and data-driven decision-making inside a company.

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Responsibilities of a Product Manager

A product manager is responsible for managing a variety of tasks and business activities. The following are some of the duties of a product manager:

• Monitoring Competitors- Finding and analyzing your competitors' products, prices, and sales and marketing strategies is known as competitive monitoring, sometimes known as competitive analysis.
• Understanding the User’s need- To design a service that works for the target audience, you must first understand the people who use your service (your users) and what they want to accomplish. This is your obligation as a product manager.
• Assembling Market Research and competition data- By doing market research, you could find clients for your business. Investigating your competitors could help you set your business apart. To offer your small firm a competitive edge, figure out how to combine them. To gain market insights, product managers communicate with data scientists.
• Monitoring internal stakeholders- Monitoring stakeholders is the process of looking closely at stakeholder relationships for goods, tailoring engagement techniques for stakeholders through changes to engagement strategies and plans, and observing and managing the team. Translation: transferring information from the design team to the development team.
• Achieving the Product Goals and Objectives- Product goals translate the product vision into specific, measurable objectives. They are quite detailed in terms of what your product will perform after it is completed and how you'll measure it.
• Depicting the Parameters for the Product accomplishment- Providing all the metrics and parameters to get a sense of how to make the product profitable.

Difference Between Product and Project Manager

The terms "product manager" and "project manager" are sometimes conflated when discussing product management. Let's head out and learn the distinction between a project manager and a product manager.

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Skills Required for a Product Manager

Let's discover the skills required to start a career as a product manager. An individual must meet all requirements to be a manager.

• Strategic Thinking- The ability to develop plans for the future may be aided by knowing your place in the market, focusing on your objectives, and seeing opportunities.
• Leadership Skills- A person's ability to motivate and lead a group of others who are cooperating to achieve a shared goal.
• Time Management - The ability to efficiently manage time so that the product may be delivered within the allocated time is referred to as time management.
• Empathy Skills- The ability to understand and empathize with another person's thoughts and feelings. Empathy necessitates putting oneself in the other's shoes.
• Communication Skills- The capacity to interact with people and impart knowledge. With the use of our communication skills, we can convey information so that the audience may understand it easily.
• Analytical Skills- The ability to communicate information more clearly and see patterns in order to develop conclusions.
• Presentation Skills- The ability to create presentations that are interesting, unique, and aesthetically appealing is referred to as presenting abilities.

Hiring 

You should be knowledgeable about the future potential of the sector before beginning a career in product management. Let's look at the organizations that are employing product managers.

The topmost companies that are hiring product managers are

• Google 
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• TCS
• Oracle
• SAP
• HCL
• Wipro
• Zoho

Salary

Let's proceed and learn what a product manager makes. 

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Conclusion

In this article, we have studied that a Product Manager defines the customer demand and overarching company goals that a product or feature will help to achieve, lays out what success looks like for a product, and gathers a team to make that vision a reality. The product manager is in charge of bringing a unique product to market that fills a market demand and offers a promising financial opportunity. Making sure the product meets the company's overall strategy and goals is a crucial part of the product manager's job.

To become a Certified Product Manager, you can refer to Professional Certification in Product Management Simplilearn’s Course.  

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