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By Archan Mehta -Product/Program Management at Amazon
The role of a product manager in a team is very similar to a product’s value proposition. Just like a value proposition articulates the benefits of a product to potential customers, a good product manager discerns the disparity between excellence and mediocrity, and ensures that step taken in the product development process contributes to the product’s success. The difference between good and status quo owners is to know the difference between good and bad and what is done from not enough. Value proposition tells prospects why to do business with competitors and makes the benefits of your products crystal clear from the outside. The value proposition is a blend of brand, experience, and product. The job of a product manager is to discover products that are valuable, usable, and feasible.
1. Organizational leadership: As organizational leaders, product managers are expected to assemble high-performing teams and nurture the members to perform as best as possible.
2. Discernment: Product managers must navigate the fine line between sufficiency and excellence, and ensure that every aspect of the product exceeds expectations.
3. User-centric anticipation: Product managers should be able to anticipate how user needs can be solved.
4. Technological proficiency: They should have the ability to understand the technology and innovation aspects of making a product.
5. Long-term vision: They should be able to think long-term and not sacrifice value for short-term gains.
Effectiveness is the degree to which something is successful in producing the desired result. The difference between successful and status-quo product owners is the work ethic they embrace every day. The major effectiveness rules are:
1. Readiness: It is expected from product managers to be very proactive in any task they take up.
2. Transparency: They should present their work to their team and stakeholders with logical arguments.
3. Time Management: It is essential to be operating within defined timelines to optimize productivity and resource collaboration.
4. Prioritization: Effective prioritization techniques can be used to focus the effort on tasks that need immediate attention. You don’t need to work faster or eliminate gaps in productivity to make better use of your time. You just need to spend time on the right things.
5. Clarity: To explain this further, take the example of how employees at Amazon conduct presentations. They use documents over slides because document shows the best choice for editing, making changes, etc. Documents are hard to write, and writing them brings clarity to the mind.
As a product person, you are not expected to not only own but to drive design, development and the simultaneous launch of the product in the global market. For this, you are just looking for a toolkit of things and also a human-centered approach. System-level design thinking is the methodology where the owner accounts for all the components when you are doing system design.
For example, in the embedded control of a designed jet engine, a system guy has to think about the dynamics of the engine, sensors, interaction of input and output devices with the sensors, and so on. The term design thinking itself refers to applying designer sensibility to methods and problem-solving, no matter what the problem is.
People use computing today primarily for accessing and sharing information, for productivity, and for entertainment. With devices that we have today like Alexa and Google Home, you can imagine waking up in the morning, talking about the weather, and traffic, and giving context to your smart objects at home.
Why do we see breakthrough products only once in several years? One reason is that very few have the skill set of system-level design thinking. Our structures are outdated- we have functional teams to follow processes in work in silos while someone from the authority would come up with a vision, and innovative ideas and would try to pull together required pieces. This can be a CEO, a founder, a product manager, or an industrial engineer. This creates huge opportunities for people in the room who are passionate about building great products and widening their skill set. Some common design types are industrial design, fashion design, UX design, visual design, and experience design.
Execution is 70% of your program, design, definition, etc. As a product owner, you are responsible for driving, designing, developing, and simultaneously launching the product in the global market.
It starts with a concept, a business case, and a product plan developed and becomes a kick-off with a plan of record exit, PRD release, and system design release. With tooling release, you get the mechanical design database ready for release with P1, P2, and P3. You get the prototype validation with the first, second, and third rounds of design validation, then the shipping, and finally the lessons learned.
The value proposition of a product manager lies in his ability to make complicated ideas easy to understand and tell interesting stories about them. They also need to clear up any confusion that comes up in the path of product development and guide the product to keep growing and getting better over time. Product managers are like leaders who encourage everyone to always make things better and consider everything as a whole. They play a big role in making new technology and how people interact with it in the future.
About the Author:
Archan Mehta – Product/Program Management at Amazon
The value proposition shows how a product fulfills a particular need of customers, its features and benefits, and how it is better than competitor products in the market.
Product managers can add value in many ways like collaborating with different teams, being an organizational leader, having technological proficiency, and having a long-term vision of the product.
Product managers can be called mini CEOs because just like actual CEOs, they need to be multidisciplinary and cross-collaborate across teams. They act like the centre of all product-related activities.
