Anisha has done MBA in Marketing from NMIMS And Executive Management(PMNO) from Harvard Business School. She has been instrumental in growing CATKing Digital with her experience with Marico and Henkel in the past.
Mr. Amol here is our guest who is a mentor at ISBR and he is here to guide us through Product Management and what it is all about. He will be telling us about the job roles given, career options around it and the misconceptions at hand regarding this. It is an enriching session so stay glued till the end.
What roles are in Product Management
First of all, there is misconception in the market that it is not for IT sector which is very wrong. Product Management, also known as Prod Man, it is something that can be for any product regardless of their field. Product Management means solving a particular problem.
Let us understand the Manager aspect of it for better understanding about the job roles:
- As a Product Manager we need to Identify the Problem in the industry or product.
- Ensure that you give proper solution of the problem while empathizing with the customer.
- For best understanding here in Prod Man, understand the user to attract the customers. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and take action. Keep yourself in the problem i.e. look for the color, packaging etc. and stay with the problem to understand the user demand till the solution is found out. Once done, Scale it.
- The job roles involved would be role in Checkout Page design, make Application faster, Data driven activities and pricing etc.
- Value Proposition Designing: Understand the Problem, Understand the Customer, Understand the Solution.
Functional aspect of Product Management:
We shall understand with the help of example. Example of Swiggy. So for Swiggy what is more important to them is to deliver particularly the food that you desire to have but in order to do so effectively they take help of technology. Their new strategy of 10mins delivery with good packaging show their objective that User experience should be good, understand the functional aspect of problem and the user with ease. A good Product Manager would focus on:
- Fixing the Problem.
- Getting a nice UI/UX.
- Customer Delight (icing on the cake).
Software aspect of Product Management:
This involves all the backend activities involved in successful running of the software, application and ensure efficient usage of it. A Prod Man will take care of with the help of the same Swiggy example:
- Swiggy will take care that it provides minute by minute tracking of its product to the customer.
- The Swiggy application itself will show the delivery guy is following all the protocols, does not do wrong and delivers at the correct time. All this through the app so that customer could witness this happening and Swiggy has mastered it.
Conclusion:
Product Management applies to every sector. Externally, the key thing is understanding. By keep yourself in the problem as a manager and give space to think about:
- How desirable is the particular problem as a customer, also, identify the critical problem there.
- After identification of the problem you need to determine whether the solution is possible to implement in the problem.
- Business is run only when we make some profit out of the solutions and a good Prod Man realizes this too. So we need to assess whether we can make money out of the solution or not.
Altogether, when we consider the role of Prod Man internally in the company or sector, it always tells us to understand what is getting implemented and what happens inside the product, how software is built and understand clearly the technical aspects of the same too. For this you need to build a technical mindset in order to assess things better.
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