Recently, I’ve been meeting with successful PMs to learn more about the role and skills required for this position. Madhu Prabaker, a Product Manager at Yelp was kind enough to share the resources below with me, which I felt was an awesome guide for anyone interested in learning more about Product Management.
What is Product Management?
Product management isn’t a role or a function, it’s a set of skills. Those skills help remove obstacles and grease the wheels so that the functional experts can do their jobs best. Product management also balances the needs of users, the business and the team and makes the difficult tradeoffs needed to keep pressing ahead. In that way, Product Managers are very similar to CEOs. Very few would argue that a company doesn’t need a CEO. Product managers are simply CEOs of their products. http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-role-of-product-managers/2012/06/08/
Product Management as Just Three Responsibilities
What game are we playing, and how do we keep score? This line sums up the responsibility of Product Strategy. Being able to understand the objectives of implemented features is important, and so is measuring whether they are effective as well. ttp://blog.adamnash.com/2011/12/16/be-a-great-product-leader/
Metrics for a PM
Metrics allow PMs to measure the results of new features and products. This Quora article helps dissect some of the basic metrics important to a PM. http://qr.ae/TWUYN
What does a top 1% PM do well?
The top 10% of product managers excel at a few of these things. The top 1% excel at most or all of them: Think big, communicate, simplify, prioritize, forecast and measure, Execute, understand technical trade-offs, understand good design, and write effective copy. http://qr.ae/TWUN5
Designer vs. Product Manage – The Turf Battle
It must be the goal of every aspiring User Experience Designer to eliminate the need for Product Managers who do anything other than outbound marketing. An interesting view on perhaps a trend where PMs will become increasingly design focused. http://jacksonfish.com/2012/07/11/designer-vs-product-manager-the-turf-battle/
Stuff. 