The role of product management
When you start a company, you focus on one thing and one thing only - the product. At that stage, the product IS your company, you don’t have much else. Without the product, you have nothing to sell (unless you sell smoke and mirrors).
At some stage, you start growing as a business. You have real customers, you need to ramp up your sales, your customer support, but at the same time, you need to keep developing your product, as that’s what you can monetize, that’s what you can sell, and that’s how you can grow your business.
While you are growing your business, at some point, you can’t make all the decisions anymore, you need to scale the company, it’s operation, and one of the crucial steps is to scale the important job of making decisions about the product. That’s why you would introduce product management into your business.
While “making decisions” might not sound like a fulltime job, making a decision has to be well-informed. As a founder, or a CEO, you have been making those decisions based off a vast amount of context. You are now hiring product managers to make those decisions for you, to make you scalable, and for that, they need to have at least the same amount of context. Ideally, they can go much deeper than you could, as the focus is on choosing what to build next. Their everyday job is to answer the question “What is the next most valuable thing my team can build?”
Value is a two-fold variable. While you are a business and you want to see the revenue line in your PnL to grow, that comes as a consequence. First and foremost, you need to build value for your customers. You need to understand their pain, their needs, you need to understand how can your product significantly improve the business of your customers. It needs to be a sophisticated and severe improvement, so that the customer is willing to pay for it, which creates the value for your company, the desired revenue. Without providing real value to your customers, any revenue you might be making will disappear in a longer run.
Understanding customers really well, understanding finances of your business, data, market, legal landscape, ethics, technological constraints, usability and more is a full time job of a product manager. Only then, they can make the qualified decision of how to invest the cost of their team the best to create the most value. They work closely with a product designer who understands how to best solve the problems of your customers, and developers, who, on top of co-designing the “how”, build scalable and reliable solutions that run flawlessly in production.
