The Product Manager - Background Note - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School
Two primary responsibilities
A product manager has two primary responsibilities: (1) defining the new product to be built; and (2) managing its development, launch, and ongoing improvement.
The proposed new product should fulfill the following conditions.
- Desireble to potential customers
- Technically feasible to make
- Economically viable
Breakdown processes
- Defining problems/solutions/products
- Identifying and evaluating opportunities
- Specifying requirements - MRD(market requirements documents)
- Prototypes and strories
- Product requirements document(PRD)
- Negotiating resources and setting priorities
- Building, launching and improving products
What is the role of product manager?
Actually, you need to wear many hats if it is relevant to product development.
- CEO: You are CEO of your product.
- Coach: PMs too must inspire, motivate and convince their team to fight for Every Single Inch.
- Engineer: the best PMs are culturally engineers: you have the DNA of a hacker, you get XKCD humor, you have a favorite programming language, your standards of fashion are low.
- Janitor: you’ll also have to do a lot of work that no one else wants to do.
- Hammer: You need to be able to turn “no” (everyone’s default answer) into “yes” (to which people need to be given a reason to arrive at).
- Router: act as “traffic cop” and route things to the right place.
- Super user: A PM who is constantly reporting bugs is a PM who gains credibility with the engineering team as someone who is passionate, detail-oriented and cares about quality.
- Inventor: So great PMs are usually creative types, who can generate and churn through many ideas all at once, to think on their feet and arrive at solutions to difficult and multi-faceted problems. Every day you will find yourself needing to invent.
- Ghost: knowing when to disappear. Often this comes from a good place; folks are just trying to help.
Different contexts mean completely different product managers
The definition of product manager totally depends on the following conditions of your company/team and environment.
- Size and maturity of companies
- B2B vs B2C
- Centralization
- Scale of deploy
- Culture and philosophy
- Engineer departments' power
Unsuccessful product and why?
In the class, professor Vivek introduced Juicero as an example of an unsuccessful product. He actually highlighted it is difficult to define an "unsuccessful product" because it depends on who evaluates this.
Juicero failed in the several points as follows.
- Lack of demand: healthy-centric customer tend to pay much more effort to create a juice. So they don't want two minutes quick cooking.
- Bad product structure: An expensive juicer actually does nothing. You can actually squeeze packages by yourself.
- Wrong branding: As another proposition, Juicero can track everything about juice drinking behaviour. It should have appealed those points. (But still does not make sence the expensive juicer)
Three Questions to ask as a PM
- Why this problem?
- Why my solution?
- Why now?
