The 2 Fundamental Components of Product Management (Draft)

What is Product Management about?

What do Product Managers do?

What’s the difference between Product Management and Project Management?

These are common questions I get asked by my candidates, colleagues, and people in the industry.

Due to the wide range of responsibilities that come with the Product Management role across different organizations and domains, it’s difficult to provide a universal explanation for it.

I believe that understanding the fundamentals of product management can make it easier to explain its various aspects.

Product is the core of a business

“Product Management is the art and science of creating the products that give each company it’s existence. It’s the core of a business.”

Frerk-Malte Feller, Workplace by Facebook

There are 4 types of business

• Delivering Value with Profit = Good Business
• Delivering Value without Profit = Charity
• Not Delivering Value with Profit = Are you phishing?
• Not Delivering Value without Profit = Are you stupid?

And of course, we will be talking about a product that helps businesses create value and generate profits, enabling them to succeed.

The components of Product Management

You might have seen this chart at least once when you started your research about product management

Or even these ones

There are different ways to explain product management, but when you focus on the definition above, it’s about turning your product into a machine that can accomplish two essential tasks

• Deliver value, monetize the value
• Get revenue, reinvest to deliver more value

To grow a business continuously, the loop of delivering value and generating revenue must be continually expanded, and this is the essence of Product Management.

Product Management is about building a continuous loop of delivering value and getting revenue to sustain your product and business.

And how do User empathy, Customer discovery, UX design, ect fit in this loop, you may ask.

Deliver value

For this part, product management is about to understand the problems and offer the best solution to the market, which leads to these activities:

• Discover and understand the problems
• User empathy: Interviews, Usability tests, Personas
• Solutions: Design, Engineering, Project management
• Analysis: Quantitative and Qualitative analysis
• Support: Documentation, Onboarding, Help center

Get revenue

To be able to deliver more value sustainably, you need money to build up your product. And monetizing your product includes:

• Sales and Pricing
• Marketing
• Product Marketing

Grow the Loop continuously

• Vision, Strategy, Roadmap: prioritization
• Competition
• Management
• Leadership
• Operations
• Partnership
• Legal

Takeaways

• Think Product as a core of a Business, it’s not only about releasing a bunch of code.
• Product Management is about building a continuous loop of delivering value and getting revenue to sustain your product and business.