Secret Sauce of Successful Product Management
Product Management is the process for defining and supporting the building of desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable products that meet customer needs. They work with a wide range of people to identify and define :
· Customer needs and understand the business context
· Develop the Product Vision, Roadmap, and Features required to meet these needs.
· Build Agile Development teams in delivering value through the product life cycle
Responsibilities of Product Manager
The primary responsibilities of Product Manager fall into these four main areas:
· Meet business goals – Products and solutions must meet the financial business goals
· Develop the Product – Product Managers collaborate with their teams working in an agile fashion to build the functionality
· Go live – Product Managers work with Sales and Marketing to ensure solutions are deployed for internal testing and external users
· Support and Upgrades- Product Managers continue to work on new features and updates based on customer feedback
Delivery Management using Kanban
As per a recent PMI report, 48% of projects are still not finished within the scheduled time, 43% of the projects are not finished within their original budget and 31% of projects don’t meet the original goals and business intent.
In another KPMG report, only 31% of all organizations deliver projects that are likely to meet original goals or business objectives. In addition, just 34% of organizations deliver projects that are likely to achieve stakeholder satisfaction.
In last few years, Kanban is emerging as a more efficient delivery management process vis a viz Scrum for product development. The meaning of Kanban in Japanese is “Visual Board” and it was first introduced in Toyota in 1950’s. Kanban aims at developing a service-oriented approach and expects the PM to deeply understand their customer’s needs and create a high output delivery team using Kanban principles and ensure that the processes continuously keep improving.
There are 4 principles of Kanban:
· Visualize workflow
· Limit work in progress (WIP) and prioritize
· Focus on flow
· Continuous improvement
The following terms are used in Kanban frequently:
· Kanban board
· Kanban card
· Columns
· Swim lanes
· Cycle Time
· Lead Time
· Throughput
· Work in Progress
· WIP limits
Product Managers can use tools like Jira which give you an out-of-the-box workflow with Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done.
Traits of a good Product Manager
A good Product Manager should be able to independently:
· Conduct customer interviews and user testing
· Run design sprints using Scrum or Kanban
· Feature prioritization and roadmap planning
· Internalize market assessments reports for prioritizing features
· Translating client requirements into technical features
· Pricing and revenue modelling
· Defining and tracking success metrics for the product
Also, there are a few areas in which companies differ in what they want from a Product Manager.
· Technical skill-The type of product , who uses it (B2B, B2C) will determine how technical and hands-on a PM will need to be.
· PM drives engineering- In this approach, the Product Manager gather requirements, write the product requirements document, and give it to the engineering team to detail out the technical requirements and feature list. Here, the understanding is that the Product Manager knows best about what customers need and engineering is there to build it.
· Engineering drives product- New age technically oriented product companies (AI, ML, Cloud, Big data) tend to be engineering-driven, where engineers are using new technologies to build new products In this, Engineering teams hold the fort and the Product Manager is supporting the engineering teams.
Many times, Entrepreneurs get enamoured with an idea and start building a product without doing proper research and start building products which eventually flop. Effective product management should be driven by a customer-centric mindset in which the customer problem/need is placed at the centre of every decision.
-If you would like coaching on any Project Management practices then connect with me.
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