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
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. […]
7 Years of Amazing Product Talks
For the past 7 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 […]
Why Product Management Should not be Responsible for Project Management
Jordan Bergtraum is a management consultant with over ten years of experience in the B2B SaaS industry, mostly as a head of product for various organizations in the legal, education, facilities management, and pharmaceutical spaces. He has been responsible for product strategy, UX, and teams consisting of product and project managers. In his ProductTank NYC […]
Your Product Manager Super Power: Not Knowing Everything
How Much Should I Understand? A friend, who’s recently become a product manager, asked me that recently. She’d inherited a technical product where the engineers already had a view of the direction and deliverables required. Even though it had been broken into phases, each phase was large in scope and involved a number of unconscious […]
Do Tech Skills Benefit a Product Manager?
I have hired product managers for a while now, and worked with dozens. And since I come from a tech background, I have been asked many times (and I asked myself) if product managers should have some tech skills. Should they know how to code, and how it would help them in their daily work? […]
20 Years of Product Management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha
Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0. Since then he’s had his share of successes and failures in a storied career spanning the US and Europe, and in this entertaining and insightful talk from Mind the Product San Francisco he distills those 20 years into twelve key […]