What is Product Management?
“The job of a product management is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible” says Marty Cagan, Founding Partner of Silicon Valley Product Group and a 30-year veteran of product management. Similarly, our own Martin Eriksson calls product management the intersection between business, user experience, and technology (only a product manager would define themselves in a Venn diagram!). Product Management is about bringing together those functions and more to build value for the customers and the business.
Read on to learn more about what product management is, how the product manager job works, and what you need to do to become a top product management practitioner and build products people love.
LATEST POSTS
Stuck in the Middle With Product Managers
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, Stuck in the middle with you Stealers Wheel, 1973 Martin Eriksson made famous the diagram below, showing how product managers are at the cross-section of business, tech, and UX (by the way, I’m not implying any of these groups are clowns or […]
What's in the DNA of Product People?
I think there’s nothing better than talking to product people – they are my kind of people. The reason I say this is because product people put their hands up to serve right in the center of organisations where the competing pressures of business, technology, and the customer intersect. That is why I’ve thoroughly enjoyed […]
Product Management is Simple, but Very, Very Hard
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Mark Twain At its core Product Management is about making choices between countless possibilities to deliver value to the end user while meeting organisational goals and constraints. Simple huh? But not straightforward, nor easy to achieve. Indeed, this is […]
Want to be a Product Manager? Just get out There and Make Products
Are you trying to break into Product Management? I’ll start with the bad news. There are a huge number of motivated, intelligent people who are looking for a first step on the ladder, and very few entry-level roles to go around. These budding product managers have many things in common. Most of them are familiar […]
The Perks of Being a Generalist
I’m lucky enough to be able to say that I love what I do – but why? What is it that gets me up to go to work every day? Like many in our field, I fell into a product job somewhat by accident, but I count myself as very lucky to have done so. […]
8 Years of Amazing Product Talks
For the past 8 years Mind the Product has run #mtpcon in London and San Francisco and #mtpengage in Hamburg – the biggest and best product management conferences in the world. We invite some of the top product thinkers and practitioners from all over the world to share their experiences, insights, and lessons, and now […]
Product Warrior Launches First Podcast, Thinking Big and Small With John Cutler
Product Warrior launches a weekly podcast, supported by Mind The Product, dedicated to supporting product managers in their decision making. The first episode, titled “Thinking big and small”, is out now, featuring guest John Cutler and host Dave Martin, chief product officer at Tes Global. John, a senior product manager and “all-round product junkie”, discusses […]
How to Apply a Design Sprint to Voice-Based Products
At the outset of 2018, there are already over 50 million voice-based devices shipped, up from 1.7 million in 2015 (see footnote). Consumer adoption of voice-based products has grown to the point where businesses need to understand what voice-based experiences can mean to them. But, as I’m sure we’re all aware, exploring new business models such […]
Good Behavioral Product Manager, Bad Behavioral Product Manager
A good product manager generally has a keen instinct for human behavior. However, the best product managers have learned how to incorporate the science of human behavior in a more rigorous way than just relying on instinct. This post (with a nod from Ben Horowitz’s seminal post) introduces the idea of a behavioral product manager (BPM) – a product […]
Product Management Is Not Project Management
As a product manager, it’s easy to get caught up doing the wrong job. With so much time and energy going into shipping great products, the project management demands of it all often create a center of gravity that’s hard for even the most veteran product managers to escape. But the most successful product managers know […]