Product Management

If you’re a product owner, associate product manager or product manager wanting to understand the full breadth of the product manager role, I’ve put together a generic product manager job description, so that gap analysis can be done to learn and gain experience in your knowledge gaps, which will set you up for success in the world of product management.

It’s unlikely that you will be provided with guidance or training on the full breadth of the product manager role and it’s up to you to proactively fill in your knowledge gap by testing and learning new ways of working with your product, reading books and being curious by collaborating with different areas of the business to find out more about the customer, their role and product performance.

About the role:

The Product Manager will join the product management team and take the pivotal role of managing their product line and its outcome on the customer and business.

The candidate will manage the entire product life-cycle across their product line to solve customer and/or business problems using Agile and Lean principles, by collaborating with their cross-functional team (which also includes a product designer and several engineers), as well as key stakeholders including other product managers across other product lines, BI, commercial, operations, marketing, brand, customer support and legal / compliance teams – the Product Manager is at the heart of the business, so building strong relationships and having good communication skills is important.

The Product Manager is expected to:

• Define, manage and share the vision, missions, KPI’s, strategies and roadmap for their product line.
• Own and manage the product backlog, so that the highest priority PBI’s are ready to be solved / validated with a PRD / hypothesis.
• Manage all aspects of in-life products for their product line, including customer feedback, requirements, and issues.
• Proactively collect and analyse qualitative and quantitative data to aid prioritisation and to explain why the problem is worth solving.
• Have a deep understanding of customers by talking to customers and customer support frequently.
• Collaborate with marketing to continually grow the product.
• Discover new ideas / problems in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Drive action across the business to get time sensitive product iterations to market on time.
• Review how time to market can be reduced across their product line using Lean principles.
• Manage stakeholder expectations when there are multiple constraints.
• Adapt to change quickly and creatively find ways to validate ideas with customers in a Lean way.
• Proactively remove any impediments from getting the value from idea to the customer.
• Clearly describe what problem we need to solve, the value and customer flows to the development teams and stakeholders.
• Dynamically switch from live support / BAU to long term strategy on a day-to-day basis.
• Monitor product performance daily and communicate wins across the business.
• Monitor and research the market to understand competitor SWOT.
• Present product performance to senior stakeholders quarterly.
• Create and share a product delivery update every two weeks.
• Be the player and use the product frequently including user acceptance testing.
• Line manage and mentor associate product managers.

Overall

• Embracing their product line knowledge and effectively sharing with other team members and stakeholders.
• Evangelising their product.
• Striving to make progress towards their KPI goals everyday.
• Leading the go to market (GTM) strategy within Agile methodologies.
• Focusing on outcomes rather than outputs.
• Accountable for the success of their product line.

Position Qualification & Experience Requirements

• Passionate about solving customer problems.
• Proactive with stakeholder engagement.
• Proven track record of managing all aspects of a successful product.
• Strong time management and organisational skills.
• Experience with Scrum, Kanban and Lean principles and methods.
• Strong problem solving skills and willingness to roll up one’s sleeves to get the job done.
• Will give exemplary attention to detail and have excellent communication skills.
• Is creative with an analytical approach and can easily switch between creative and analytical work.
• Outgoing, positive and forward thinking.
• Excellent communicator of product updates, trends, priority and the rationale behind them.
• Have an obsession with creating great products with your team that customers love.
• Has a high EQ.
• Become the voice of the customer – be an expert on quantitative and qualitative insights.
• Experience with tools such as Tableau, Aha!, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Jira, Confluence, Lucidchart, Firebase or other equivalent tools.