📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

What lives product manager

We decided to refresh the summer season with a career event “How Product Manager Lives” , and to understand the topic of product management.



The Alpha UX marketing department conducted an online survey to find out how an ordinary Product Manager day goes. More than 100 products from 500 different companies took part in the survey. Let's see what happened:

')

// Planning and execution

To begin with, productologists were asked what their responsibilities were and what they generally do at work. Here are some answers:

- I am an "external" product manager. I spend as much time communicating with customers as the products themselves. I also often interact with the marketing department and generate ideas for creating content ...

- I lead the strategy of product development right up to its development and implementation, I work with heads of various departments: from sales and marketing to development ...

“I prioritize product requirements, manage the product development lifecycle from idea to release, distribution, and product implementation.”

As for daily tasks, product managers talk about engaging in strategic and tactical work. Although few of the products themselves write code, they still need to have technical skills and sometimes “get their hands dirty”. Here are indicators of the popularity of various types of daily activities of product managers:



It is not surprising that meetings are the most popular type of activity among products, considering how important a place is in their work communication.


// Focus on user

The work of the product involves the understanding of users and marketing processes, the ability to find problems and opportunities, as well as the generation of new product ideas. About 60 percent of respondents spend time talking to customers personally.
In order to get insights and versatile feedback, products constantly conduct interviews with customers, collect focus groups, and in the case of digital products, keep track of metrics.



Often product managers think that they know what their potential users want, but after losing precious time and money they realize that they were wrong. To avoid such situations, products try to get feedback from users and learn insights throughout the entire product creation cycle.


// Everyday problems

Until now, the most serious problems of the products remain the internal policy, processes and bureaucracy of the organization. Other serious difficulties are the lack of resources and the work with R & D to define the product concept.



Disagreements between products and developers are quite common, there are even some guides already written that are designed to help departments work together. Friction is mainly associated with the desire of developers to specify and document everything as clearly as possible on the one hand and with certainty of the need for constant iterations and experiments on the other.



Products work tirelessly! Most work on more than one product at the same time: on average, one manager can “pull” from 3 to 10 projects.


// Tools and resources

Specialists in grocery management use an incredibly wide range of tools, which is not surprising, given the number of their daily duties.

The most popular tools are Microsoft Office, Google Apps, JIRA, Wufoo, Balsamiq, SAP, GoToMeeting, and Trello.


// Findings

The management and development strategies and tactics used by product managers have evolved significantly over the past couple of decades. In a large company with an advanced team, product managers must do it in a day ... well, in general, a lot of things they have to do.

Product managers follow trends, constantly and comprehensively develop to understand and predict the requirements of the market and customers. They use third-party products and services to in turn develop and improve their products. The main quality of each product is the ability to think strategically. It is this that helps create a structural roadmap of the product and find new opportunities first.

Full research can be found here . If you want to know about the work of the product manager from the first person - come to us.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292936/


All Articles