Product Management

Product management is the discipline that steers the development, marketing and evolution of a product across its entire life cycle. The role sits at the intersection of market, engineering, sales, marketing and operations and translates customer needs into prioritised features, roadmaps and go to market strategies. In software companies, product management is now one of the central strategic roles.

Tasks and responsibility

Product managers analyse market and customer needs, define product vision and strategy, build roadmaps, prioritise features, write specifications, accompany development and secure go to market. They own success metrics such as market share, revenue, customer satisfaction and adoption rates, usually without direct line responsibility for developers or sales people.

Methodological tools

Typical methods are personas, jobs to be done, wireframes, prototyping, user story mapping, OKRs and KPI dashboards. Agile frameworks such as Scrum or SAFe set the pace at which features ship. Battle tested frameworks like Marty Cagan's product discovery model help to check value, usability, feasibility and viability risks early.

Practical use

In day to day marketing, product management collaborates closely with product marketing, which owns the market communication of a product. For data driven products, product management additionally uses analytics platforms, A/B testing and predictive models to prioritise decisions. Good product managers measure success in real usage, not in shipped features.