Role of a Product Manager – Creating Business Strategy
The role of a Product Manager varies greatly across diverse organizations. A product manager is the most prominent customer advocate and a problem solver at the crux. A product manager has to impact the business by solving customer problems positively.
A typical product manager has to;
- Identify user problems
- Prioritize the problems based on the impact
- Hypothesize the cause
- Think of existing or innovative potential solutions
- Align stakeholders such as Business, Tech, Analytics, Design, other PMs
- Deliver
- Measure business impact and Iterate
Apart from the above responsibilities, a large part of a Product Managers time goes into Documentation. It is one of the underrated skills which is generally not talked about.
Depending on the organization’s size and the organization’s org structure, the role of a product manager changes. Listing down a few Product Manager roles and a general sense of what their work entails.
Platform Product Managers: A platform product manager impacts a lot of internal teams, including other product functions. They have to build so many consumer-impacting products which other Product Managers will use. A platform product manager is spent most of the time with developers and internal stakeholders.
Few responsibilities of Platform Product Managers are;
- Thinking of scalable solutions
- Aligning teams across the organization about the vision
- Supporting other functions to build superior customer experience/service
Skills required
- Understanding of APIs
- Ability to talk technicalities with the developers
Which companies provide platform product manager roles?
Companies with a high volume of engagement/transaction/traffic are always looking for Platform Product Managers to scale up their efficiencies and ensure a smooth user experience at more increased traffic.
Growth Product Managers: Growth product managers are more focused on metrics. The metric depends on the type of product, but typical metrics a Growth Product Manager focuses on;
- Engagement (for social network products)
- Traffic
- Order Conversion (for e-commerce products)
- Repeat Purchase
- Retention of the platform
- Cross-sell/acquisition from other business lines
In a 0-1 type of setup(early-stage startups), a Growth Product Manager is also responsible for finding new product lines which can potentially generate revenue
Skills required
- Ability to Experimentation
- Analytics and Data understanding
Which Companies provide Growth Product Manager Roles?
All the consumer-facing product companies offer such roles but early and late-stage startups can have more opportunities in this domain.
Data Product Managers: For Data Product Managers, data is the product. They are not end customer-facing in any way.
Few responsibilities of Data Product Managers are;
- Data visualization
- Data Modelling
- Data warehousing and pipeline
- Building A/B experiment tools to help evolve the product
Skills required – Deep understanding of;
- Data Science
- Technology
- Infrastructure
- Analytics
Technical Product Managers: Typically, a Technical product manager is concerned about the technological aspects of the product. They sometimes play the role of bridge between business teams and tech teams to translate business requirements to technical requirements better.
Few responsibilities of Data Product Managers are;
- Frequently assessing new tools and technologies to improve product
- Evaluation of Third-party tools
- API-integration
~ Ashwani Kumar Mishra, Senior Product Manager at Pharmeasy
Product management is one of the hottest domains now, considering product managers need to drive the strategy, execution and optimization of all products for their businesses. Emeritus gives you a chance to learn more about this up-and-coming domain from world-class faculty of top universities and industry experts through our several courses in product management. Learn the end-to-end process of strategizing, designing, developing, delivering, and managing products to drive success.
