How to be a Product Manager

This guide was written to provide information on how you can start in your career as a Product Manager. I wrote this with the perspective of the Philippine software industry, although a lot of the information here applies regardless of the country.

Product managers come in all shapes and sizes. In the advent of tech companies and startups, the role has become more prominent, even in the Philippines where the nascent startup scene has been bubbling for years.

This guide is written through the help of the community in Product PH and the Startup Community in the Philippines for current and future Product Managers. Our goal is to create a comprehensive guide about Product Management that would be constantly updated and will be constantly relevant for both old and new Product Managers.

For any comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me here.

What is a Product Manager?

The main role of product managers is to guide the success of a product and to lead the cross-functional teams that build and improve the product. It is considered to be a key organisational role — especially in development companies — that sets the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for a product or product line. The position sometimes requires marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. The role varies in scope and focus depending on the company, but across all companies, Product Managers always are in the position of ownership and responsibility of their products.

Product managers provide the deep product expertise needed to lead teams to success. Normally a role that has seniority but lacks direct authority over any personnel, Product Managers need higher level of communication skills, leadership, and stakeholder management to do well in their role.

The role of a product manager changes depending on the type of organization and the size of the organization. In Facebook, where a product manager is just one in the many, many people working in the Product team, product managers are more specialized and skew more in Research, Data Analytics, and the core product management discipline. Compare that to a small startup where a product manager would typically handle everything from project management to product demos.

Nonetheless, most product managers are rooted in certain core items they are responsible for. Here are the core aspects of product leadership that all product managers are accountable for:

How do you get into Product Management?

Product Managers need to walk the line between technology, design, and business. When hiring straight from college, the best courses are typically the ones that are more immersed in business and tech, but do not lean specifically on one way or another. Nonetheless, many in the field have been successful due to their own merits and not because of their education. It is not uncommon to see product managers who come from liberal arts background, although such backgrounds require extensive immersion in tech.

Here are the common ways people get into Product Management

My Story in Product Management

Back in 2017, I shared my experience in how I got into Product Management. This deck narrates my background coming in, how I ended in Product, and what I learned eventually through it all.

Common Paths for People who go into Product Management

Product managers come from all manner of backgrounds, including:

• Engineering, Research & Development
• Quality or Operations Management
• Technical Support
• Marketing Communications
• Customer Support
• Sales Support

Additionally, some firms hire individuals directly from firms in the target market segment. There are many paths into this interesting and important role.

While product managers can advance their own functions or departments, it is common for experienced product managers to advance into general management or functional management roles. Most product managers are also promoted into sales, marketing, and other general management positions. Their broad-base of industry, offering, and operations knowledge make them highly desirable for a number of roles in an organization.

Here are a few skills you might want to consider developing:

• Collecting feedback from users, prioritizing it based on business impact and consumer impact, and sharing the information with relevant decision makers who can make changes happen
• Coming up with a new idea for a feature and detailing out all the things it would do, then figuring out whether it can be built
• Analyzing data from your website / app to determine common user paths or whether certain business events had a major impact
• Managing revenue or profit and loss lines for a specific product or service and making changes that increase that revenue
• Leading a project from start to finish that involves people from different teams coming together to build something

How Technical Should a Product Manager Be?

Product Managers have met success in their careers without writing one line of code. But no Product Manager can succeed without understanding basic concepts of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Agile Methodology. As a professional who needs to influence tech teams into working a certain way, you need to understand how they work and the different processes and concepts of their work.

Nonetheless, Product Managers coming from an engineering background have a distinct advantage on being able to get data they want faster and understanding the systems better than their non-tech counterparts.

Here are the skills that we recommend product managers have.

How to Build the Right Thing, A Case Study

In 2018, I presented a case study to Product PH members about my experience in building products and the failures and successes from it. The slides below goes over the different products I built and the reasons for their failure after doing a post-mortem.

How to Become a Better Product Manager

Conversational Style

Product managers are able to sell their products through a conversational style of organizing clients. They tell captivating stories focused around customer pain and their emotions, which motivate others to action.

While bad product managers are straight up salesmen - they are unable to lead with authority, so they try to persuade teams to implement ideas they come up with. The key is to establish yourself as a professional who wants to inspire, and not to sell.

Learning is Always the Key

Product managers are not only great leaders, but they are also efficient followers. Whether it’s customer interviews, shipping product or looking at user metrics, good product managers are always focused on what they can learn to improve their craft.

Undesirable product managers are focused on shipping as they believe that success is only defined by delivering product into the hands of their customers and earn profit. They never see how shipping is subset of learning. They fail to revisit what they ship and use what they’ve learned to iterate on the original idea.

Multipliers of Efficient Team Players

For the most part, product managers are multipliers. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of their team and find ways to amend and utilise those skills. They learn the best way to work as an individual but at the same time, work with the team for productivity.

On the other hand, inefficient product managers are individual contributors. They have to be the first to have an opinion and sometimes prioritize their individual decision.

Context Over Ideas

Product managers share context and is the curator of the best ideas. They invest in collective sharing of thoughts and opinions and know the best ideas will come from a team where everyone has shared objective ideas over the customer pain and the reason to care to solve them.

Never jump to a solution without team consultation as those bad traits will produce low-quality output that no one wants to sign up for.

Decision Making

When it comes to decision making, product managers make a small percentage of team decisions. Their priority is to empower everyone on the team to make the best decision, especially on crucial situations.

Bad product managers make a large percentage of team decisions because they view themselves as the person who knows all the right choices. A good indicator of this is a team’s progress when their product manager is unavailable.

Make Everything as Simple as Possible

Product managers aims to inspire people to handle leadership without hesitating on the level of difficulty. If you ever see a product manager and think that you could do his/her job with the same success, then they’ve done their part as a team leader.

On the other hand, product managers who don’t prioritize team-building talk about their stressful lives, always run from meeting to meeting and never seem fully engaged in conversation. You’d never want to handle the job because of the stress that comes with it.

Knows How to Handle Bad Outcomes

Product managers stay humble when they reach success. Winning in product development is a team sport, and there’s no “product” in team. They share the glory with others around them and make sure everyone is there to celebrate both big and small wins.

Product managers who can’t handle criticisms are the first to come up with an excuse and never want to talk about how they could improve for the next time around. They often point fingers at engineering, design, leadership…etc.

Great Relationship Builders

Good product managers are relationship-driven because they believe that relationships trump feature requests with external customers, and internal relationships drive great teams. They spend time knowing the people they work with on a personal level and think about the long term game, not the immediate future.

Bad product managers are heavily transactional. They tell others what they can do for them and ask for things in return. Everything is give and take.

Marketing Skills are Essential

Product managers are trained marketers. They know their target audience and know how to reach a wider audience and design their product for distribution.

Unprofessional product managers view product marketing as a secondary necessity that only the content team are supposed to handle.

Focused on Success

Product managers are focused on having a successful output. They know when to push a team for a specific solution, and when to be creative on how to get there. They are persistent in pursuing clear customer pain and only focus on a select few to solve.

Unorganized product managers are all over the place. They run teams in a decision by committee basis. They want everyone to be happy and are willing to cater to every request.

Spotlight on 2025 Product Management Trends

Remote work will be the New Normal

2020 pandemic brought about drastic changes in how people work. With less contact and imposing distance, remote work is highly adapted. It will still be the case for 2021 to fight the COVID-19 pandemic is still in its beginning stage. Apart from the pandemic's reality, companies saw plenty of advantages with working remotely; fewer expenditures, less foot traffic, higher diversity and inclusion of workforce, and efficient recruitment of competitive talents.

Seamless Digital Experience will be in-demand more than ever

People spend a big chunk of their time online not only for entertainment, socialization but also on working remotely. With the rise of digital products, the demand for user-friendly, fast, and interactive platforms, tools, and interfaces will be high this 2021. Thus, the need for more creativity and adapting strategies in developing digital products that users demand and need.

Renewed Product Strategies

2020 was a year business realize how unpredictable everything can be. With the higher closure and reported income loss of companies across many industries, adapting new strategies this 2021 and the coming years is on the rise. Instead of short-term goals, businesses are forced to think proactively and plan long-term to help them get by through situations like the pandemic. In a way, this is an excellent opportunity for Product managers to form innovations to let a business stand out and target customers.

Common Questions About Product Management

Reference/s:

Lei, M. (2018, February 26). So you want to be a product manager? This is how I got started. Medium - Freecodecamp.org. Retrieved from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-break-into-product-management-d354944308c0

Wright, V. (2018, December 18). What Education Do You Need to Be a Product Manager? Work - Chron.com. Retrieved from http://work.chron.com/education-need-product-manager-2487.html