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Invoice4you for Product Management

hello everyone my name is Kenzie kabesti I'm an ex-googler annex BCG consultant and the founder of rocketbox an online platform that helps candidates prepare for interviews in today's rocket blocks mini-lesson we're going to talk about a topic that I really enjoy which is what is the role of a product manager this is an increasingly popular role because big companies like Amazon Google Facebook etc that are doing really well hire a ton of product managers but also basically anywhere where you need software products or hardware technology products you're seeing product manager roles pop up so this is in you know retail companies and financial service companies like banks travel companies hotels etc basically everywhere where software is being built you have product managers being hired and this means even in the traditional consulting firms like McKinsey or BCG they're hiring product managers into groups like McKinsey digital and BCG digital Ventures because they're helping their clients build software products as well so it's a very cool very popular role you could spend a ton of time talking about what the role of product management is because there's a lot of variance but what we're gonna do in this video is lay out three core tenants and walk through each of those so the first is leadership the second is execution and then we're going to talk about product sense and product strategy so those are the three buckets we're gonna walk through and we'll talk about the details and kind of describe the role in each of those so let's go ahead and jump in okay the first aspect I want to talk about is leadership and I think it's important to talk about the specific type of leadership that is present in p.m. rolls so the first part I want to talk about is that the leadership that product managers do is not typically of the type of direct reporting leadership they are not they usually do not have a direct reporting line from the engineering team to themselves from the design team from the user research team etcetera so they're not in the position where they're saying you know you do X you do Y and have the formal authority to tell other people on the product team what to do and similarly they typically don't have a team of product managers also reporting to them that they're telling what you know they should do as well for an entry level and even most mid-level product management jobs typically you won't have anyone reporting to you even though you are leading the product team that's the first part you don't have a direct reporting authority so let's focus on how does a product manager actually end up leading generally what happens is you have to lead through a product vision you have to establish where is this product going what does success look like for us and how are we going to get back you might join a product that already has a product vision or you might create that product vision from scratch but regardless you are going to be the keeper of the product vision and this is kind of the nature of the leadership where you are the keeper of this product vision and you need to figure out how to get all the other constituents that you work with engineers sales team designers researchers executives on board with your vision and get it you have socialized appropriately so that everyone understands what matters most what's less important how different priorities are going to shake out and how you're gonna actually get things done and where you're trying to take the product so the leadership that's present in product management roles is very real and very palpable but it's not a typical direct reporting structure where you have a massive team just reporting to you you come up with an idea and you tell them to do it it's more about understanding what the product vision is and making sure that you can kind of line up the rest of the team behind that vision so you can all work together to get there it's a soft kind of influence job rather than hard power so that's the first part the second key aspect is execution or quite simply getting stuff done now there's the common stuff that almost every product manager will do some flavor of which is writing and creating managing the roadmap or you know writing and creating product specs or product requirement documents which detail how a particular feature should be implemented you know edge cases to be handled etc by the engineering team but there's a ton of other activities that a product manager on a daily basis will do to help their team get to whatever that kind of product successful and wherever that product vision is taking them and in reality what often happens is that a product managers time will get allocated if they're doing things right to which ever sort of activity or function needs the most help at a given time so this is a heavily operational role where you are focused on doing things to kind of unblock other teams or move initiatives forward and you have to be pretty flexible about where you allocate your time so for example if the product is selling really really well you have customers signing up like crazy but the engineering team is struggling to keep up with that demand and they're shipping new features but there's a lot of bugs you might you know in some weeks or maybe even months spent 70% of your time working really hands-on with engineering to be triaging different bugs coming in prioritizing them fixing which you know figuring out which ones you need to fix first etc on the flip side you might be in a situation where the product is working really well it's in good shape the engineering team is kind of humming along but the sales team is really struggling to sell the product and so maybe you start joining more sales calls you've go you know you're maybe flying to do some meetings in person in some cases or maybe you know if it's a b2c business and you're not talking each individual customers you're spending a lot more time with marketing and trying to figure out how do you get the message out about your product and content marketing and online ads etcetera so you might spend 70% of your time doing that but regardless what Ben's in a product management role is that a significant portion of your time is execution we focused on trying to unblock whatever the biggest kind of blocker is at the moment to you and your team reaching the product goal that you've set for yourself so that's the second key part and a ton of time will be spent in this executional phase putting out whatever the highest highest and biggest fires the third category is generating insights as a product manager you're going to be working in a really dynamic environment your competitors might be changing every quarter the technical limitations of the product spaced or working it could be changing or evolving rapidly the priorities of the company that you're within could be changing the customer needs can be changed there's a bunch of things going on that are in flux and because of that what you what are the key parts of being a product vendor is continually generating insights and kind of refining your own product sense which is going to be a critical part of you being able to inform your own product vision right so we talked about the very beginning that a key part of the role is leading people and helping everyone understand the product vision so that you can work as one team and get there and then the second part of the role is executing and just doing whatever kind of blocking and tackling needs to happen to get the job done and this third part generating insights is where you are making sure that where you are leading the team and where you are helping them execute is all going in the right direction and so there's a bunch of different types of tasks that fall into this role you might spend time analyzing a new you know a sign-up funnel or the impact a new feature is having or you know the current churn rate of the product and how you could make it better on the flip side you might be thinking about technical limitations or new technical capabilities maybe there's a new API you could leverage maybe there's a way you could rewrite some code to make things faster you might spend time researching consumer needs talking to consumers understanding their pain points thinking about whether the design of the application really helps them do what they need to do as seamlessly as possible regardless of what type of task were talking about across that spectrum it's all serving the purpose of helping you as a product manager build your product sense about what matters in this particular space what matters for this particular product and building that and generating that will help you refine and evolve the product vision to make sure that you're always going in the right so that's the third key aspect of the product management role it encompasses a lot of different things and it ties together with the other two you can't really have a product vision that stays static over time in a dynamic environment you really need to continually generate insights understand the market understand your customers to know that you're going in the right direction at all times so one last thing I'll leave you with as you're thinking about the role of product manager what we've tried to do here is give you a high-level three-part framework for thinking about what is the role of product management one of the key responsibilities and and buckets where product managers would spend their time on the job but there is a lot of great writing out there about what the role of product management is and even though I've spent most of my career in product management and managing other product managers I would encourage you to go read widely on other people's takes on it as well because you'll find different perspectives and interesting tidbits out there and to help with that I'm gonna put a ton of links below in the comment section about you know some of our recommended reads on the role of product management some content that we've got on the rocketbox site as well as interviews with seven other product manager product managers about how they got into the role of product management what they were doing before and what that journey was like if you're at the beginning of the stages of thinking about breaking into product management I would highly recommend checking that out so thanks again for watching this video we've got a ton of great content coming out on the rocketbox channel on a weekly basis so if you haven't subscribed yet already please do so below and thanks again for watching have a great day