What Is a Product Manager?

What is a Product Manager?

The product manager identifies the customer's requirements and the larger business objective a feature or product will fulfill evaluates the product's success rate and motivates the team to transform that vision into reality.

A product manager is responsible for the entire business strategy for a certain product or service. They also help decide what products must be created and ensure that the vision for a particular service or product is executed on time and within the budget.

What Does a Product Manager Do?

After learning what is a product manager, let's learn what a product manager does. To begin with, they stand on top of consumer and business behaviors and trends that indirectly or directly impact the company or product. In this profession, your responsibilities and tasks focus majorly on the success of a service, product or product line, which greatly contributes to the company’s overall success. Your day-to-day tasks as a product manager might consist of the following responsibilities:

• Analysis of customer requirements
• Researching a service, market, product or competitor
• Strategizing a plan for a service or product, including packaging, development, expanding and launching
• Communicating and coordinating a service or product with teams, management, and stakeholders
• Analyzing and gathering feedback about a particular service or product
• Creating multi-year roadmaps for services and products

Core Responsibilities of a Product Manager

Some of the major responsibilities of a product manager include the following:

1. Strategy and Vision: Making a clear vision for the service or product, ensuring it aligns well with company objectives, and creating a plan to fulfill that vision. Though this requires more experience in the role of Product Manager, it is handled mainly by the VP of products or product directors.
2. Learning about the user: This includes conducting user interviews, market research and surveys to gain insights into what users need and want.
3. Feature Prioritization: Selecting the features to create and build products based on business objectives, user needs, and technical constraints.
4. Roadmap Creation: Outlining the journey of a product with clear objectives and milestones.
5. Collaboration: Working with engineers, designers, stakeholders and marketers to bring the product's vision to life.
6. Product Discovery: A product manager is solely responsible for analyzing data and gathering insights from it. Based on the insights collected from the data and the users, they suggest features to build products.
7. Iteration and analysis: After the product launches, managers gather feedback, monitor product metrics and iterate to improve.

Top 10 Skills Every Product Manager Should Have

When you plan to become a product manager, learn the following ten significant skills that:

Technical Expertise

Product managers do not need coding but must be skilled enough to handle the technical side of product development processes. They work closely with web developers to ensure that the product is tested and created according to the specifications set for them. Hence, it is important to have a detailed understanding of the web development process and the technology behind the product.

Business Acumen

Product managers are strategically responsible for creating a vision for the product that aligns with business goals. For this, they require good business acumen. It is crucial to understand how multiple areas of a single business work together to achieve goals and hold a grip on multiple things, including cash flow, budgeting, and project margin, to be well aligned with key performance indicators and company metrics. With good business knowledge, product managers can see the bigger picture and take action as required.

Critical Thinking

Product managers constantly make big decisions about strategies, products and resource and time allocations, considering what’s best for the business. This requires excellent critical thinking skills.

Ability to Interpret and Analyze Data

Data drives product management. Hence, product managers must be capable of analyzing multiple kinds of data and utilizing the insights to make better business decisions. Product managers utilize analytics and data to acknowledge the market, test multiple versions of a product, see how users behave, uncover issues with any product and measure progress and performance against relevant key performance indicators.

Research Skills

To develop successful products, product managers should know the outside and the inside of the market. Their job includes conducting detailed research into industry and market trends, as well as research into the target user base and competitive products. This helps the product manager identify growth opportunities and anticipate potential threats to the success of the product.

Problem-Solving

Product managers must be excellent problem solvers as they need to focus on creating products to solve user problems. However, this doesn’t only apply to the products or services but also internally to come up with solutions to enhance work processes and encounter multiple challenges.

Ability to Prioritize

Product managers must ensure that each team member is working on the right things at the right time and meeting the deadlines and goals. With robust prioritization, product managers notice that requests, ideas, and suggestions come from multiple angles. As you cannot implement everything, as a product manager, you must determine what’s a high priority and what belongs to the backside.

Strategic Thinking

Everything performed by the product manager should be done with the entire strategy in mind. Strategy thinking helps you learn how to make decisions and set priorities, how to set goals to transform vision into reality and how to define your vision for that product. Strategic thinking is all about considering the bigger picture, deciding on the right product development and achieving these goals.

Communication Skills

As a product manager, you cannot overstate the importance of communication skills. Launching and creating a successful product requires investment from different departments and experts, ranging from developers and designers to customer service and sales teams, and to align these different teams, the product manager stands as the star player.

Soft Skills

Product managers must have soft skills as they are extremely crucial for the field. You must listen to and understand the demands and problems of your other team members, as well as clients. Moreover, ensure you communicate in a very professional yet presentable manner to put forward your thoughts and ideas.

Types of Product Managers

Listed below are the types of product managers:

• Data Product Managers
• Technical Product Managers
• Strategic Product Managers
• Growth Product Managers
• Product Operation manager
• Platform Product Managers
• UX Product Managers
• Enterprise Product Managers
• Internal Product Managers
• Startup Product Managers
• Function-Specific Product Managers

List of Top Tools Used by Product Managers

The top product management tools used are:

• Best for building roadmaps and prioritizing ideas: Jira Product Discovery
• Best for task management and issue tracking: Jira
• Best for knowledge management and documentation: Confluence
• Best for prototyping and design: Figma
• Best for real-time communication: Slack
• Best for feedback and async collaboration: Loom
• Best for brainstorming and ideation: Confluence whiteboards
• Best for A/B testing: Optimizely
• Best for connecting Dev and Ops: Open DevOps
• Best for data collection: Amplitude

The Future of Product Management

The demand for product management roles is growing rapidly due to factors like the adoption of technology across industries, the growth of ecommerce and the dominance of big tech companies. If you are an individual looking for a career that combines leadership, design, strategy and other skills, Product management is the right career for you. And to excel in this career, you must join Simplilearn’s Product Management Program. This program covers essential areas such as market analysis, agile frameworks, and strategic product planning, enabling you to lead innovation and create customer-focused solutions. 

Additionally, explore our diverse product and design courses to boost your career, shift into product management, or refine your design capabilities. Get started today!

FAQS

1. How do product managers prioritize features?

Product managers prioritize features by considering each product's feasibility and user impact. Then, they rank them according to their importance. The most important items are listed at the top, and then they assess each item's business value.

2. What are the most common mistakes product managers make?

Some of the most common mistakes product managers make include not understanding users' needs, poor communication, being heavily dependent on intuition instead of data, and failing to adapt to fluctuating market conditions.

3. What is the most challenging aspect of product management?

Product management's most challenging aspect is balancing demands and priorities from different stakeholders, teams, customers and businesses, keeping up with the latest industry trends and making crucial decisions with limited information.