What is Product Management?

Simply put, product management is the art of managing a product.

The term product management comprises of two basic keywords product and management. This means there there must first be a product in existence before there is management of that product. Product management is the systematic process of bringing a business goal to life by ensuring the success of a product vision.

A product is anything that provides benefit to people. It could be digital or physical.

For a product to succeed it must be customer centric, that is, product has the customer’s situation, perceptions and expectations in mind.

A product goes through certain stages of its lifecycle (introduction/development, growth, maturation and decline). Product management begins from ideation through development, testing, deployment, post deployment, feedbacks and improvements.

Who is a Product Manager?

A person involved in product management is called a product manager. To be a good product manager one must have basic technical skills and be abreast with technology terminologies.

A good product manager works with the engineering team (software developers, UX/UI designers) to meet customers satisfaction while keeping business goals in mind in order to do an effective work. A good product manager must also have a good and in depth understanding of any product for which he wishes to manage and the goal of such product.

A product manager asks or answers the questions;

▪ For whom is this product made?

▪ For what purpose is this product made?

▪ How will this product be used?

▪ What is the benefit of the product to the customers?

▪ What will keep customers glued to this product?

▪ How can we improve this product?

▪ Why are customers no longer using this product?

Skills Needed to be a Good Product Manager

In order to excel at being a good product manager, there are certain skills both hard and soft that must be acquired. Broadly speaking, a good product manager must be skilled at strategic thinking, business thinking and effective communication.

A product manager should possess hard skills such as:

▪ Business basics skills such as price, revenue, profit & loss etc

▪ Research skills i.e. user research, market research etc

▪ Analytics skills i.e. churn rate, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost etc

▪ Technical skills such as user story writing, SQL etc.

It's also requisite that a product manager has the following soft skills:

▪ Communication

▪ Stakeholder Management

▪ Negotiation

▪ Teamwork.

Tools Aiding Product Management

To be a successful product manager, it is important to use the right tools in product management with the right triggers within the market space. Tools such as customer feedback management tools and time management tools are very important.

Examples of effective tools that can be used include;

Google calenda, Calendly, Zoom, Figma,Todoist etc

Agile Methodologies

A good product manager ought also to use agile methodologies to achieve success. Agile methodologies is a system of working which preaches that cross-functional, self-organizing teams and their customers/users work collaboratively, flexibly and incrementally.

For further reading

1. Product Management;The complete course by Azodo Nnamdi