The Black Box of Product Management

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by kyllo on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @04:01PM (#10502616)

I don't see why people think of a Software Product Manager's job as amorphous or poorly defined. The job description is straightforward: you manage features. You gather information from users/customers and/or sales & marketing about what new features and feature enhancements are wanted, define what criteria satisfy the features, get estimates on what the features will cost to build, and you make decisions about how to prioritize and schedule the development of features, to make the product as successful as possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by zzalpha on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @04:35PM (#10502880)

And yet, you yourself have left out:

Marketing of any kind. PMs often are either directly involved with marketing or work with a PMM.

Market and competitor analysis.

Tracking and being held accountable for KPIs, particularly P&L.

Strategic partnership development and management.

Corporate strategic planning.

Facilitating communication between sales and marketing, engineering, technical communications, and senior management.

I'm sure the list goes on.

And BTW, how it's defined varies from company to company. Some folks might place some or all of those responsibilities under the auspices of a CTO or COO.

So I disagree. I actually think the role is incredibly ill-defined... everyone has a different idea of what it means. Some people think it's basically an Agile Product Owner, polling customers, writing user stories, managing backlogs and working with engineers. Others describe it as "CEO of the Product", which implies a VP-level leadership-style position. Yet others probably see some weird amalgam.

And that's just what the role is supposedly defined as. I'll bet there's a wide gap between what a PM job description says someone should do, and what they actually do in practice when you have to marry the theory with organizational reality. After all, aside from various KPIs, I'm not aware of any obvious way to actually evaluate the performance of a PM...

And we haven't even delved into the ambiguity of moving from "what" a PM does to "how".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by analog31 on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @07:15PM (#10503708)

A lot of it is managing conflicts. Those decisions that you make will change over time, often outside of your control. The changes can come from above, below, inside, outside, or from within.

No battle plan survives first contact with Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, Finance, or Upper Management.

No battle plan survives second contact either.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by alexhaar on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @06:55PM (#10503618)

Creating value != managing features. In many cases the opposite is actually true.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by kyllo on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:52AM (#10507371)

"Creating value" is everyone's job, not just the product manager's.

A software product is defined by its set of features, therefore a product manager's job should be to manage the feature set.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by sanderjd on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @06:58PM (#10503629)

Creating value != creating features, but it might equal managing them. Determining which ones to not create or to remove is also "managing".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by alexhaar on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @07:08PM (#10503679)

Fair point, I should have left out the second part. My point is that creating value shouldn't be associated at all with features. Creating value might be 1) striking a deal with a partner, 2) tweaking an operational process, 3) improving a customer support script, etc etc etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Black Box of Product Management by kyllo on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:55AM (#10507401)

1) striking a deal with a partner, 2) tweaking an operational process, 3) improving a customer support script, etc etc etc.

Yes these tasks add value, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are, or should be, part of the Product Manager's job description. They may get done by Product Managers in some cases, but they could also be done by people in various other roles.

[ Parent | on HN ]