The Role of Software Product Manager
The product manager leads and manages one or several products from the inception to the phase-out in order to maximize business value. He/She works with marketing, sales, engineering, finance, quality, manufacturing and installation to make his/her products a business success. He/She has the business responsibility beyond a single project. He/She determines what to make and how to make it, and is accountable for the business success within an entire portfolio. He/She approves the roadmap and content and determines what to and how to innovate. He/She is responsible for the entire value chain of a product following the life cycle and asks: What do we keep, what do we involve, what do we stop?
Here is a short list of topics how software product managers can deliver better results:
- Behave like an “embedded CEO”
- Drive your strategy and portfolio from market and customer value
- Be enthusiastic on your own product
- Have a profound understanding of your markets, customers and portfolio
- Measure your contribution on sales (top-line) and profits (bottom-line)
- Periodically check assumptions such as business cases
- Take risks, and manage them
- Foster teamwork based on lean processes
- Insist on discipline and keeping commitments
- Be professional in communication, appearance, behaviors …
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—Anonymous.
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“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)