Product management

What is product management?

Product management is a highly collaborative role. Here are some of the things that product managers focus their time on:

• Research: perform research to ensure product-market fit, build user personas, and keep a pulse on competitors
• Strategy: create a compelling strategy that’s all about articulating how you're going to dominate your market—including goals and objectives, product overviews, and buy-in.
• Communication: develop a strategic plan using a product roadmap, get stakeholder alignment including executives, marketing, UX, engineering, etc, and ensure a steady drumbeat of communications throughout the product lifecycle
• Coordinate development: once a product manager has received approval on their strategic plan they’ll have to coordinate with the relevant teams to execute the plan
• Continuous testing and feedback: once the product or feature has been released in the market it’s critical that product managers keep a steady pulse on their users, collecting feedback about what’s working, what’s not, and what can be improved

The role of product management in customer experience (CX)

To stay on top of changing customer expectations, successful product management means integrating user feedback whenever possible. 

If a product manager feels sure they already know their customer, it's time to check again. Even if they’ve collected their feedback in the past it’s critical to be in a continuous state of learning because customer behaviors and expectations evolve in ways that are challenging to predict. 

While product management has traditionally focused on usability, it’s impossible now to ignore its impact on CX. In order to build products that meet customer expectations, we recommend integrating fast feedback loops into any product management strategy.

Learn more about product management and the various roles here.