Product Management has emerged as an exponentially growing career in recent times. Product Management involved a soft blend of strategic thinking, market analysis and catering customer requirement
What is Product Management?
Product Management has a critical role in a product development team, that involves transforming an idea to appreciable product meeting the need of the customer.
Product Management comprises a wide range of responsibilities:
- Understanding Customer needs : Product Manager conducts a proper market research, gain critical insights about the market and analyse the data to get important information about the user behaviour and loose points.
- Defining product vision and strategy: The product manager are responsible for developing clear vision for the product, marking it’s goals, target marketing and it’s position in the market. Product manager are also responsible for developing the complete development roadmap of the product.
- Managing the product development process: Product management involves looking after the complete production cycle of the product. From ideation to development to launch and beyond, a product manager is responsible for carrying out all the processes in a smooth manner
- Prioritising and Managing product backlog: Product management involves multiple techniques to prioritising important tasking and managing product backlog. Ensuring that the development team focuses on the most critical tasks.
- Measuring Product Success: Product Management have multiple metrics to track the success of the product and identifying areas that need improvement.
Why Product Management is Important?
Product manager plays an essential role in launching new product to the market. From brainstorming the idea to designing and executing the complete lifecycle to final launch of the product, the product manager looks after all these steps.
Most importantly, product manager collaborate with different team, to ensure the product is made according to the requirement of the customers. They are also responsible for collecting valuable feedback from the customer, so that the product can be updated on that basis
Product Management Lifecycle
Product Management Lifecycle comprises 6 stages:
1. Innovation
This is the first stage of product management lifecycle, this stage involve generating ideas and validating if it is sustainable or not.
2. Analysis
In this phase, product manager are required to check if there’s a market need for the innovated idea. Strategising the requirement and procedural plan for the product or an idea.
3. Development
After the development of the roadmap, the development cycles starts. This is an iterative process. The idea is converted to an appreciable product. This involves product design and testing.
4. Go-to-Market
In this phase, the company prepares for launch by running trials, finalising the proposition, and making sure the company is ready to sell the product.
5. In-life
This phase of the product management life cycle involves tracking performance of the product, and fixing any issues based on customer review
6. End-life
When product is no longer needed it shifts to the last stage of the product management lifecycle, i.e the end-life stage. In this stage the product is taken down.
Key roles in Product Management
Some of the most important roles in product management are discussed below:
- Product Owner: A Product Owner is a role defined in Scrum with a focus on highlighting and prioritising requirements of the product.
- Product Manager:A Product Manager is responsible for strategising, planning and delivering of product.
- Product Marketing Manager: A Product Marketing Manager develops the techniques and programs to sell a product effectively
Conclusion
As technology advances and customer expectations evolve, the product management role continues to adapt and expand. Product managers are increasingly embracing data-driven decision-making, utilizing analytics and machine learning to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and product performance.