Getting Started with Product Management — What is Product Management?

Recently, I am seeing a north rising trend in people getting into product management.

They come from all walks of aspects of work — Design, Development, Testing, Sales, Marketing, and Support.

Their experience range from somewhere around a few years to many years.

Sometimes, they begin with the question of what exactly is product management, what a typical day of a PM would involve with, and go on to ask about the scope of product management in long run.

And here I just wanted to share what I know to people who are interested in getting into product management.

I will keep this post really short and will try to cover further in upcoming posts.

Product management from 30,000 feet

I usually go about looking conceptually from a macro perspective that gives me a silhouette of things and also helps me plan my short term goals towards the vision. It’s quite hard to zero down on specific definition of what product management is as it encompasses more broader scope in design, customer support, engineering, as well as in marketing.

If drawn a Venn diagram of design, engineering and business, product management is strategically located at intersection point between three major components of any product

© 2011 Martin Eriksson

A product manager basically mixes the technology, the business and the design into right proportions and offers a delightful experience to the user.

In fact, product management in Zoho Corp, that is where I work is profiled as Program Manager in Google, while it is called Module Manager in Adobe, and this keeps changing as you talk to different product management personnels across companies in your space of interest.

Irrespective of what name you go by, as a product manager you basically work with engineers, designers, marketing, legal, public relations, product support and sales.

To get started with product management, you need not have any pre-requisites or special knowledge.

However, this doesn’t mean it is easy-peasy.

You need to understand three major aspects there in the Venn diagram.

Technology:

Technology is far from engineering.

In fact, technology is a simplified version of engineering.

In other words, it is a product of engineering itself.

It is the main heading that you have for a chapter that deals with complex theories, axioms, corollaries, and other scientific study and observation.

Let’s take an example of suction motor as a technology that we see often in a plumbing solution.

Earlier humans used to fetch water from nearby water sources which took greater effort and time, and soon they started to solve this problem of investing too much effort and time into a solution and brought in plumbing solutions that brings water right into our homes from nearby water sources.

There are intricate engineering involved in building a motor.

The length of shaft, the number of coils, the gear ratio and the pressure valve is set to bring in perpetual flow into the system.

The final output of an engineering is what the technology that we call as motor.

Design:

Technology as such is just an application of engineering, and to reach a wider audience who face similar problems. We design a solution using the technology.

A motor in its native form was something which only an engineer who built it knew how to operate it.

That was sure not the intended purpose of motors were.

Engineering and technology in its crude form isn’t consumable.

It’s just like crude gold that are mined, aren’t directly consumable. We need to involve engineering and design process into it to reap out the jewellery or accessories made of it.

The plumbing solution is the technology that involves suction motor and pipelines, and the engineering would be how to build the suction motor, the shaft length it should have and in the case of pipeline’s what material should it be built with, tensile strength and so on.

Such sophistication needs simplifications and that simplification is called design.

Business:

The commercial aspect of a solution is simply what is meant by business.

There should either be a tangible or an intangible reward during a transaction in offering the solution.

Early 1800’s saw an upheaval in research carried out in field of electromagnetism and it went on to building motors and soon electric motors came into the picture.

When electric motors — AC and DC motors were in production, the electricity as we use it today were commercialized further more adding revenue to governments.

Hence, to sum up, product manager understands what technology is, and takes it and processes it into user experience.

This is what is called a product in the simplest terms.

In IT context,

SaaS is what we call technology.

Web components are what we call as design.

Our profits and losses flow are what we call as business.

With this understanding, we can proceed in getting started with product management but wanted to reserve it later in another post altogether.

Your claps here sure means a lot to me, thanks.