What is product manager?

Notes from product manager course on lynda.com

So product management is actually a pretty difficult role to define, consise, good explanations just by Googling it. Try Googling it right now, and their exact responsibilities change across different industries in different companies. And you have one set of responsibilities, you might have a completely different set of responsibilities at another company. What we’ll focus on here are the core tenets that make up product management.

The first and most important thing that you’re actually not a manager of anybody. No one reports to you because a product manager needs to continuously interact with a number of different people, get maximum, collaboration from their engineers, and also the designers that they work with. Think about it for a second. If you wanted honest feedback from engineers and designers that you work with, but you’re also their boss, do you think they’re going to tell you if they have any disagreements with what you have to say? probably not. So you want they talk to you every single time. Product manager is someone sitting multiple are in company and acts as a communication hub, organizer enabler for anyone else

So here a funny story, he want hire a engineer join to a company. He ask “what do you do?”, he hadn’t never worked with a product manger before. Before I could answer, the other engineers said: “that’s the person that stops sales and legal from emailing you”. As a product manager, you’re kind of blocker slash enabler for engineers and designers. The communication and enabling aspect of product management is a very important one. Engineer are very good at engineering, and designer are very good at designing. So it’s best if these people spend their time doing what they’re best at. While engineers focus on solving hard technical challenges, product manager are talking to various stakeholders, users, receiving feedback and looking at metrics to decide what thing can be build next, and which to those things is most important and the best use of time.

Have you ever used a product, either software or something physical, where many things about that product are really good, but then there’s one small piece that just really terrible. If there’s something wrong with any product, you can blame the product manager. Basically a product manager is someone who’s responsible for that product being successful or not. To recap, the product manager is many thing. A communications hub, a proritier, a reseacher, a presenter, but most importantly they’re responsible for the ultimate success of the product.

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