Who is a Product Manager? — A series — Part one
A lot of amateur delineations of the term “Product Manager” are ubiquitous. Some say a Product Manager is a hustler, some say a PM is at the intersection of tech, business and design and so forth.
But who is a PM?
In the most simplest of terms, a PM is the owner of the product/feature right from its inception to its realization. Any product/feature has a lot of dimensions to it — ideation, design, architecture, sales and finance. A PM is responsible for all these aspects of the product. For being successful, any product needs to be desirable, viable and feasible.
The main job of a Product Manager is to achieve this happy intersection between desirability, feasibility and viability.
Needless to say, desirability is the most import aspect for any product to be successful. If product is not desirable, working on the feasibility and viability aspects is of no use.
A product manager interfaces with several domains -
- Data Science
- Design
- Project Manager
- Dev
- Consulting and Support
- Sales and Marketing
- Legal and Finance
- Management
The most important role of the Product Manager which remains common across these interfaces is the inputs given to each of these interfaces. The correct inputs result in the optimal output. The PM needs to be very precise in his inputs to these interfaces and might need to handhold the teams during the whole product lifecycle.
There are different roles of a product manager in an organization, depending on abstraction w.r.t. business and technology.(Continued in Part 2)
