Product management is responsible for making sure a team builds the right things, for the right customers, for the right reasons. It sits between customers, the business and the people who design and build the product.
Three Overlapping Concerns
Value: will customers choose and keep using this? Viability: does it work for the business, including cost, pricing and legal constraints? Feasibility: can the team build and maintain it with the time and skills available? Product managers work with design and engineering to answer these questions before and during development.
What It Is Not
Product managers are not the boss of engineering or design, and they are not simply collectors of feature requests. Their authority comes from understanding customers and the business deeply and from making trade-offs transparent.
In an Early Startup
In a small company, the founder often holds the product role alongside many others. The risk is that product decisions are made on intuition alone, or by whoever spoke to a customer most recently. Even a light process, which this course will help you build, improves decisions noticeably.
Exercise
List the last five product decisions your team made. For each, note who made it, what evidence was used and whether value, viability and feasibility were all considered.