What is Product Management?
“The job of a product manager 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.
FEATURED CONTENT
LATEST POSTS
Guest Post: Knowing You Are A Product Manager Makes All The Difference
Editor’s note: ‘Product Manager’ can be an ambiguous term in some companies, like ‘UX’ has been in recent times. A big part of what we’re trying to do at MindTheProduct is help companies understand the Product Manager and to identify this person formally within their teams. Almost always, at least one person is already doing […] Read more »
To Kill a Feature
Kill a feature every week. When you kill the wrong one, people will make noise and you’ll be clued in to what actually adds value. — Dave McClure, FOWA 2009 How do you know which features need to be killed? Every product that’s been around for some time will inevitably have some leftover feature ‘residue’: […] Read more »
Product Management on a Dime - a few lean product management tools
If you’re like me and working at a startup, you understandably cringe when you see the price of some software solutions, even if you know they might make your job (and life) easier. However, being a good product manager isn’t about having a high-end suite of tools at your fingertips – part of the fun […] Read more »
Data-Driven Product Management—Where To Start?
This is the first post in a series we will be writing on analytics and the data-driven Product Manager. Analytics is an essential area for product managers to understand but it can be intimidating when you’re just getting started with the basics of product management. For those of you considering a role in product management, […] Read more »
The Brand and The Product
Brand is the personality of your product. Done well, it should evoke feelings of goodwill and loyalty, and even forgiveness for your quirks. It gives your promoting users something tangible to refer to as they recommend you to their friends. A key metric for measuring this is, of course, the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Getting […] Read more »
Creating a Product Culture Starts with Communication
Having a product culture is about having the product, the very thing that you’re building, at the heart of the business, a core aspect that’s granted the attention it needs. This means that everyone in the company is an advocate for what you’re building and how you’re building it. The most successful product-centric companies include […] Read more »
User Feedback, The Google+ Way
Direct feedback from users of your product is an essential part of product management. While analytics will provide heaps of data to infer what users are thinking, direct feedback from users adds another dimension to this data. And Google seems to have upped the stakes recently. This is a look at one of the most important aspects […] Read more »
The State of Product Management
Product management is a nascent and little understood role within many media companies, and I was commissioned by the BBC to research the state of product management in media drawing on specific BBC projects and consulting companies such as Channel 4 Television, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian News & Media, YouTube, […] Read more »
7 things I wish I knew before I became a product manager
About a year ago I started a soul-searching process. I was ‘suffering’ from professional schizophrenia. I started my career as researcher on the sociology of Wikipedia with the emphasis on community dynamics and trust, then joined Yahoo! as their community go-to person. I contributed product ideas, helped them formed their European objectives, and did some […] Read more »