Digital Product Managers: What They Do and How to Become One

Product management is one of the most exciting positions in the technology industry. As those who oversee the entire lifecycle of a product, product managers (PMs) must perform various tasks that require them to integrate various skills ranging from customer development, Product architecture and UI development all the way to supply chain planning.

Top companies are often on the hunt for successful product managers. Companies are more than willing to pay an attractive salary for a good product manager.

Why become a product manager?

The product manager embodies the success of the product team. Many executives at top global companies, such as the current CEOs of Google and Amazon, began their careers as product managers. Many entrepreneurial product managers use their experiences to either join a startup team or start their own companies.

Because the benefits of this role are so great, many software engineers, salespeople, and business professionals have jumped on the product manager bandwagon. And not surprisingly, these people come from diverse backgrounds, from engineering to the liberal arts.

6 Essential Skills for Product Management

The key to being a successful product manager is not having deep expertise in a particular area. Instead, PMs must have the ability to build and demonstrate expertise in:

• Lean processes
• Marketing Analytics
• Design and roadmapping
• Adaptable systems
• Managing stakeholders
• Team leadership

1. Lean processes

Product managers need to know how to define value streams within a company and the value chain of a supply chain. Understanding value stream mapping allows product managers to identify the critical steps to serve customers or develop a product. Once processes are identified, they can be systematically improved using a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) process, also called Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), to increase throughput and reduce waste Lean Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints to reduce.

2. Marketing Analytics

Market research plays an important role in a PM's work, especially when launching a new product. Product managers use marketing analytics to examine what factors contribute to a particular user online behavior (e.g. purchasing on an e-commerce site or downloading an app) and how these factors influence the user decision-making process. These consumer insights help shed light on the entire customer experience. They give PMs a better sense of the market and its unique customer needs, so that PMs can in turn build great products with strong product-market fit.

3. Design and roadmapping

A solid product roadmap provides direction and product vision. This roadmap describes not only what you are developing, but also why. The best roadmaps are not lists of features, but of problems that need to be solved to improve performance and customer experience. On this basis, product teams are ready and able to develop products from concept to market and to open up these markets and market segments through iteration.

4. Adaptable systems

As part of the product development process, the creation of prototypes, tests and iterations are essential. Here the PM uses lean and agile processes and Architectures one to make hypotheses about the Product to test and enable performance at scale. This allows the product team to capture opportunities and optimize products to meet changing market demand, respond to the latest technological developments, and accelerate delivery to the market.

5. Stakeholder-Management

Product managers must rely on the collective thinking of their team and the company. This is not trivial, as PMs typically do not have team members (such as software developers) reporting directly to them, nor do they have any authority over the legal, Marketing - and sales teams have. Most of the work must be done through influence, by building and leveraging organizational and social networks. A team must understand and adopt the digital product management mindset. This requires strong negotiation and persuasion skills to get employees on board and adapt a product to the company.

6. Team leadership

The ability to act and deliver quickly in complex or innovative environments depends on strong cross-functional teams. A product manager demonstrates team leadership in a variety of ways. First, a product manager helps develop processes and frameworks that enable teams to overcome challenges and achieve goals. Product managers are also able to clarify how each team member's contributions add up and are linked to key business goals and outcomes so that the work is meaningful for everyone.