【Technology002】What is a Product Manager

【Technology002】What is a Product Manager
Barack

——Product manager is a job that needs to be responsible for the whole life cycle of a product.

1. Motivation
   It was in October 2014 that I began to know about the position of product manager for the first time. Recently, I decided to get an offer of product manager after graduation, so I begin to learn about it again.

2. Responsibilities
   The product manager discussed here mainly refers to the product manager for Internet products. I think the main duty of a product manager is to propose a tool to solve problems in real life.

In order to address needs in real life, a product manager will try to design a product as a carrier to solve this demand. If this solution is considered feasible after investigation, the product manager needs to communicate with engineers about the realization. He/She also needs to communicate with the artist for product appearance and visual effects. And he/she needs to get user feedback for updates of the product.

A product manager would accompany the life cycle of a product. He/She should be the person who knows the best about this product. What a product is to a product manager should be what a child is to his/her parents.

3. Requirements
   A product manager should have good logical thinking ability. Designed products should be used to make users have a sense that it is supposed to be so. For consumer-grade internet products, if users need to pay a greater cost of learning to learn the use of a product, then I think there is still a lot of space for improvement in this product.

A product manager is the best engineering background. There are many on the networking about the tension between product managers and engineers’ segment, though exaggerated, I think it at least reflected part of the reality，it is unreasonable for some product managers to ask for the needs of engineers. Such a product manager takes it for granted.

A product manager does more than just to transfer the actual needs of the user without processing it directly to the engineer. If required from the user, Product managers should be able to conceive first if they must use engineering means to solve this problem, what kind of way is the most economical, only to put themselves in the first place.

From the engineer’s point of view, the product manager can try to avoid making unreasonable demands. If the demand comes from your own conception, the product managers should make adequate research in the early stages to ensure that this requirement is not pseudo-proposition.

The product manager should have an artistic foundation. In order to quick trial and error, the product manager should have the capacity to produce demo. Able to use Axure and other prototyping tools or Xmind.

Of course, the mind mapping tool is good but direct hand painting is no harm. Although the product manager himself can’t make the visual effects he wants, but he should have the capacity express the aesthetic needs that you think the product should have and be able to make it to the art staff. Art resources have appreciation ability.

The product manager should understand business behavior and economics. Products are produced to be sold to users, If there was a lack of thinking about business models in the first place, and later may fall into the dilemma of financial rewards.

As for some other soft power, such as proactive, good at communication and expression, willing to cooperate, willing to accept new things, strong execution force, strong resistance to pressure, strong learning ability, strong internal driving force and so on. They are also helpful for the product manager’s work.

4. Summary
   The product manager is different from the engineer and the art staff, the professional threshold of this position should be low, and its evaluation criteria are difficult to measure. Nevertheless, to make an excellent product, a good product manager is still essential.

Reference
https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19551325/top-answers
Know the topic:Product Manager

2019/03/31