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 …
Read more about this topic: Software Product Management
Famous quotes containing the words role, product and/or manager:
“The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.”
—Jan Patocka (1907–1977)
“Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)