Product Management mainly deals with the overall supervision of a product. The Product Management role ranges from setting vision, perception, and the product framework to building and launching the market’s product. Thus, a Product Manager is often regarded as the mini CEO of that product.
Product Management – What is it all about?
A product manager (PM) deals with the market, and the user demands to form a perception of the product being offered to them. They help the team view the construction goals while aligning the product with its business models. Finally, a PM strategically launches the product in the market.
After the market launch, the PM is responsible for the growth of the product through technological advancements. The Product Manager synchronizes the Engineering, Marketing, and Sales team to work with a unified vision and goal. That is why Product Management Roles are often defined as an intersection of user experience, technology, and business models.
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Skills Required to Become a Product Manager
- Market Knowledge: Having a good market analytical sense and audience recognition helps develop a target-oriented product. Understanding what your users want gives a great perspective to draw the outline and design a very effective product.
- Business Vision: A PM should have a sound business vision to align the model of a particular product with the organization’s overall business model. A good business architecture ensures that the product dominates the market.
- Strategic Thinker: Product Manager is the one who prioritizes the ideas and options available for product development. So, he needs to build a strategically sound concept over various approaches.
- Technically Sound: An excellent technical background helps a Product Manager understand the wireframe of the product. A sound understanding of technological architecture eases the vision for modification.
- Leadership Ability: A Product Manager collaborates with the Engineering team, Marketing team, Sales team, and the Support team. A Product Manager requires efficient leadership skills to synchronize all the teams and lead towards the goal.
- Sound Communication: The product Manager communicates with all the members to make them understand the need for properties in the product.
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Product Management Responsibilities
Product management responsibilities are enormous in the success of a product. A PM visualizes the product right from the beginning and then backs it to the market and goes on upgrading the product. Let us look at the Product Management responsibilities:
1. PM is mini CEO: Product Manager Supervises everything of a product up to its shipment and even beyond.
2. Market Research: A Product Manager does the market research to understand user demands and meet that by designing a product. Market Research can be conducted in many ways. PM may choose to analyze through surveys or by interviewing the target audience and having a one-to-one conversation with users or looking through analytical data. The decision relies entirely on the market pattern, but the goal remains the same, i.e., identifying the target audience’s demands.
3. Solid Understanding of Competitors: Market capture depends on being ahead of your competitor. A product manager should have clarity about what their prime competitors provide and their advantages over their competitors. In the case of a B2B (business-to-business) scenario, this concept becomes even more prudent.
4. Building Business Strategy: PM fulfills the responsibility of designing a business model for the product. This model should be able enough to leave behind the competitors and also should be able to align fruitfully with the company’s business architecture.
5. Designing User Experience: A Product Manager is expected to have a clear view of what he wants to achieve with this product. This leads to developing a flow of the product at the user end, followed by designing the wireframe and the product prototype.
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6. Technical Product: The technical product is built by the team of engineers led by the Product Manager. The PM should be able to visualize the whole problem and design it for the team. The entire team must be aligned to a single vision.
7. Go-To-Market Strategy: For a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) product, this step primarily relies on communicating with customers. PM analyses the responses and reviews to decide what improvements are needed to make it more efficient and usable. While in the case of a B2B (Business-to-business) product, PM forms the sales collateral and meets the e-client to sell the product.
8. Sustaining the Product: After launching it into the market, a product is continuously upgraded to cope with emerging technology.
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Product Management Role: Key Factors
Product Management roles are very crucial for a company as the latter’s growth and progress depend on PM to a great extent. It is a thumb rule that an efficient PM can increase a company’s profit by nearly 35%. The PM has to deal with a minute to massive sort of decisions regarding the product. He decides the why, what, and when of the product. If developing a product is compared with a liver, PM is the fulcrum that joins and regulates all the components.
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Why become a Product Manager?
Product Management jobs are having more significance as time progresses. It has been more than three years since the scarcity of PM jobs has outnumbered Software Engineer jobs. A typical salary of a PM ranges between $60k to $200k. The traditional procedure of hiring an employee of only a tech background is obsolete. In the upcoming days, the position of a Product Manager will be even more significant.
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Wrapping Up
The Product Management Role is considered one of the most crucial positions regarding the organization’s growth and development. High paid PMs not only develop user-friendly products but also lead the sophistication of day-to-day life by using technological tools. If you are willing to learn more about Product Management, check out upGrad and Duke Corporate Education’s Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management.
In this course, you will gain vast knowledge on how to build a product roadmap through user research, prototyping, and product analysis. This course offers 200+ fours of learning, certification from Duke CE, 15+ case studies and assignments, one-on-one mentorship from product experts.
