Product Management Consultant, Ogheneovo Nwachukwu, has said that Product management (PM) is an essential tool for business growth when properly utilised.
She noted that PM function has been diversified in various forms depending on the need of an organisation. Product Managers can come from Engineering, UX, marketing, project management, sales, business analysts, entrepreneurs, customer service and system architects.
According to her, to become a successful Product Manager, one needs to be the conduit between the business and technology teams. One is expected to be the expert on the customer, technology and market. As opposed to a project manager’s role, a PM’s success is tied to the outcome of their product rather than the launch of the project. Your product is like your baby, you need to take care of it throughout its product lifecycle.
On product intuition, she explained that product people are obsessed with intuition and occupy a strange place in the digital world, which has been ceded to a small group of people known as product visionaries.
“Product intuition is a skill, an observation of the human behavior, trained by data and applied to software.
She noted that product intuition is necessary to develop successful product-led growth teams at expansion companies but one needs to know a lot about how customers thinks and their real life.
“Articulate their values, goals, similar products they utilize and demography. The behavior we associate with great product intuition is quickly intuiting how customers who are the end-users will react to a new software. Your customer is the foundation of your product because this is where gravity needs to take you when you’re tired or lost. If something isn’t working, go back to the assumptions you’ve made about who your customer is first.
Nwachukwu said that Technology and innovation have made communication easier, where product managers have many different tools for effective communication, ranging from storytelling to data visualisation to long form writing. As a product manager, your communication is not limited to your team.
“To arrive at the best outcomes and the best results, you have to be willing to collaborate and hear what people at all levels are saying. You need to listen to internal and external stakeholders, target market, subject matter experts in your organisation and anyone or group you know would contribute to the success of your product.
“A product manager doesn’t just manage a product, they are essentially internal entrepreneurs, relentlessly championing product ideas and creating value from inspiration. They have the tenacity to push through challenges,” she said.
Nwachukwu added that when a product manager works with accurate data, it makes delivery manageable. Interpreting their needs to data analysts will ensure when systems are built into the applications, they create and capture useful event data. They need to be able to use data to track the application’s impact, measure KPIs and know most likely questions they can ask of the data. Basically, their data skills need to be more broad than deep; they need to be able to use data to communicate, analyze and make decisions.
