Welcome to your Product Management for Beginners Course. We're excited to take you on this journey into one of the most interesting and multi-faceted jobs in the tech world 🚀
What will you learn on this course?
As part of this introductory course, you’ll learn what exactly product management is, how it differs from other disciplines, and what a product manager is expected to do on the job. We’ll then go over some practical problems a product manager might face, and consider how they might tackle them.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a good understanding of product management. You’ll have begun to develop the problem-solving approach required to become a successful product manager in a modern company, and, ultimately, you'll know the fundamentals of how you would go about creating a great product that your customers love.
We won’t just cover the theory, either. We’ll also work on a small sample project together, giving you valuable insight into what a product manager might be asked to do in the real world. We'll also introduce the role of AI and how it can help you as a product manager 🪄
In this tutorial, you’ll find answers to the following questions:
Let’s begin!
What is a product manager?
Product management intersects the needs of the customer, the goals of the business, and the technical feasibility of the product.
As a product manager, you carry the responsibility for a product (or a specific part of it) within an organization. You become deeply familiar with the product in your care, the market you're in, and your customers. This deep familiarity allows you to make better strategic decisions and react to change faster than those who are less familiar with the product.
Even your boss (and their boss!) will not be as familiar with your product as you are, and will often defer to you for your judgement. This is why product managers are sometimes called "mini CEOs" 💪
Within your organization, you represent your product and its users. Research and testing are therefore essential! Product management is a highly collaborative role that will see you working closely with other teams—from marketing and branding to customer care teams and domain-specific experts (the teachers in an educational organization, for example, or the scientists in a medical company).
Your closest working relationships, however, will be with your product management team. Depending on the company, you will likely work with a cross-functional team made up of engineers, designers, UX specialists, and data analysts. Together, you'll be researching, planning, developing, delivering, improving, and eventually phasing out changes, improvements and fixes to the aspect of the product in your care.
Google sums up the role of the product manager nicely in this job description:
“The product management team works closely with our engineers to guide products from conception to launch. As part of the product management team, you bridge the technical and business worlds as you design services that our customers love. You’ll work with Googlers from engineering, sales, marketing, and finance, to name just a few. You have a bias toward action and can break down complex problems into steps that drive product development at Google speed.” (Google Careers, 2019)
As you can see, product management is a multifaceted job with a lot of responsibility and great rewards! Now let’s consider the typical tasks and responsibilities of a product manager.
What does a product manager actually do?
As a product manager, you will be responsible for the following aspects of the product:
- Product vision and strategy
- Research, development and testing
- Rollout, iteration and maintenance
How do these areas translate into day-to-day tasks? Let’s take a look.
1. Research, strategy & communication
When a product manager takes charge of an existing (or future) product, they will first familiarize themselves with both the product and the market. If the product already exists, they’ll start to use it in their daily life, as well as competing products.
They will also consider any existing research which has already been carried out, such as analytics data and user interviews. As they go through this research, they will start to get a feel for the problems and opportunities out there. During this research phase, they will set out to answer the following questions:
- What customer problems are still unsolved by the products currently on the market?
- What does the competition do well?
- What are the strengths of my own product?
In communication with the CEO and other departments, they will also gain an understanding of what the overarching company strategy looks like and where the product strategy will fit within it. They will use this to develop a product roadmap and set key performance indicators (KPIs) that will enable them to measure how successful their efforts are.
The product manager will align all of this with the CEO and other departments. Over time, this strategy will be regularly adjusted to react to changing markets, competitors, and research findings.
2. More research, development & testing
Having laid out a strategy and communicated it to the team, the product manager prioritizes the problems and opportunities that they’ve uncovered. Together with designers and UX specialists, they create a feature (or improvement, or brand new product) that they believe will solve the problem or capitalize on the opportunity.
They will then take the plan to their team of engineers to discuss, refine and break it down into manageable tasks to be tackled within a given timeframe 🔧
As the project nears completion, the product manager will coordinate with the quality assurance team to ensure that the final feature works as intended.
If the feature demands a significant time investment, or if it's a risky bet, then often the feature will have to be tested along the way prior to final release.
This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, it can be done by inviting people to test out an early prototype and observing them as they do so, noting any issues that come up.
Another option would be to run a controlled experiment (often called an "A/B test", or "split test"). In this case, you would test two versions of the product to see how they perform—the original version vs. a version with the new feature. When someone uses the product, they are shown one of the two versions at random. The product manager will then work together with a data analyst to assess which version is statistically more successful over a period of time 📊
Sometimes during testing, product managers and their teams will find that a feature needs to be fixed, sent back to the drawing board, or even scrapped altogether if it doesn't work as intended.
3. Rollout, iteration and maintenance
Once satisfied with the new feature, an official rollout is planned. Often, this requires coordination with PR or marketing to support the release with relevant advertising. Sometimes, a new feature needs to be ready in time for an important marketing campaign.
Both before and during the rollout phase, the product manager is responsible for managing dates, ensuring deadlines are met (or extended if necessary) and that the product performs as expected 🤹
Once the new product version has been launched, the product manager and data specialists will observe how it performs. If any weaknesses are identified, they will plan the necessary iterations and improvements. Otherwise, they’ll move on to the next step in the strategy.
Either way, any product will need maintenance. Something might break, laws might change, or dependencies, such as the release of a new version of a mobile operating system, might necessitate an update.
It is the product manager's responsibility to keep track of any issues that come up, and to anticipate where possible issues might arise in the future. They will keep in close contact with the customer care department to make sure no major issues arise—especially in the days following the release.
There might come a time when a particular aspect of the product no longer makes sense, or is no longer required. In such cases, it may also be the product manager’s job to coordinate removing or phasing out a certain feature of component. This will usually involve further research, impact analysis, and, of course, customer outreach.
Wrap-up
That just about concludes the first tutorial of our Product Management for Beginners Course! Nice work! 👏
As you can see, the work of a product manager is extremely varied. Depending on the organization you work for as a product manager, you might be required to do some, most, or all of the tasks mentioned in this lesson. It's also useful for a product manager to have some experience in adjacent areas of their business, such as software development and design. However, this is not strictly necessary.
If product management sounds like a good fit for you, join us for a free, live event about how to become a product manager with CareerFoundry. You can also talk to an expert program advisor at CareerFoundry to see if the full Product Management Program is a good fit for you.
There's no practical task for this tutorial but we recommend you check out this recording from a live event with CareerFoundry's Chief Product Officer (CPO) Megan Mulholland. Perfect for beginners, Megan walks you through exactly what product management is from start to finish! ✨
Coming up
In the next tutorial, we'll discuss why a product is more than just a product, and how product managers determine new product features, including how they source the data from which they build their strategies and make their decisions. We'll also introduce the role of AI in product management and how you can leverage it in your work 🪄
Looking forward to it!
