The CEO of the Product

The product manager is the person who is responsible for solving real customer problems in a way that meets the needs of the business.

By solving real customer problems, I mean defining products and features that truly change the way customers live, work, and function. By meeting the needs of the business, I mean ensuring that the delivered solutions allow the company to continue its growth, consistent innovation, and strategy towards its vision. In other words, the product manager is responsible for discovering what needs to be built for the customers, why and when it needs to be built, as well as for delivering the chosen solutions to those customers.

As you can see, there is already a lot of pressure on the shoulders of the product manager. It gets even harder when product managers are expected to achieve the desired results in the fastest and cheapest way possible. In many cases, we have a limited amount of resources and patience from the top management, and we need to find out what are the most effective ways to consistently deliver new value propositions to the market and grow the metrics that are most relevant to our business.

The job of a product manager is full of responsibilities. Generally, the role is referred to as the “CEO of the product.” It has been known this way due to the value and influences the role brings to the product team and the entire company.

Qualities such as ownership, leadership, and empowerment of people are essential attributes that helped many product people to effectively cooperate with engineers, product designers, and other organizational roles to build products that customers love. There is nothing magical behind the creation of great products. Great products are created because the person behind those products truly believed in those qualities and the impact they can bring in creating successful products.

Oftentimes you can notice how tech entrepreneurs have a strong sense of product ownership. It derives from the fact that they have started their businesses due to the passion they have for the problems they are trying to tackle. They are also the evangelists of their solutions, trying to promote their products whenever possible. Experienced entrepreneurs, however, are passionate about the problems they are trying to solve and not the solutions. It is because the solutions are not perfect. Sometimes we can find a new solution that solves the given problem better than existing alternatives.

Similarly, strong product managers get inspired by the problems they are trying to solve. They are constantly trying to improve the solutions to those problems in a way that makes their customers more satisfied. This brings to the feeling of strong product ownership - when you want your product to solve real customer pain and bring real impact on them while trying to do this better than existing choices in the market.

The importance of leadership comes when you see that people in your product team need to trust you and believe that the decisions you make daily are based on your keen understanding of your business domain and not just on your or other stakeholders’ opinions.

Of course, the charismatic influence and the ability to convince people to agree with you are strong leadership characteristics. However, those attributes without deep domain-oriented knowledge won’t be enough to win the trust of your co-workers. People need to trust you and allow you to lead them; hence, you need to win that trust through hard work and consistent learning.

Many times, the title “CEO of the product” brings confusion regarding the position of the product manager inside the product team. Note that, the product manager is not the boss of anyone inside the team. None of the engineers, product designers, and other experts in the product team other than APMs report to the product manager. Presumably, one of the hardest parts of the product management profession is the ability to lead and influence people without authority.

Now you might ask - why in that case the product manager is the CEO of the product when they don’t have the same power as the CEOs have? The answer is that even when they have power, great CEOs are trying to direct their employees through leadership, not through the ability to command. Similarly, great product managers influence people through their leadership abilities.

Strong product managers also empower the entire product team to feel and act with ownership and leadership. As I have discussed, great products are “born” through the strong, empowering, and effective collaboration between the engineering, design, and product people. Everyone in the product team should feel empowered to give their maximum for the success of the product and lead the team in aspects where they have their competency. Strong product managers consider people empowerment part of their responsibility.

The Role of a Product Manager

Product management is one of the most interesting and exciting roles one can pursue in a technology company. Positioning themselves in the intersection of business, technology, and design, product managers get the opportunity not only to solve really hard product challenges but also to work with the great talent inside the company. The product manager stands in the center of collaboration among the members of the product team and other company roles to ensure that the products and features that are being delivered satisfy both the needs of the customers and the business.

Product management is also one of the most customer-centric roles inside a technology business. Many times, referred to as the voice of the customer inside the product team, strong product managers are aware that the products the team builds should be based on real customer problems, improving specific aspects of their lives and work.

Placing humans in the center of attention is a prerequisite for designing great experiences for the customers.

Meanwhile, great product managers understand that they cannot satisfy every customer. If they try to implement all the feature requests, the product will eventually turn into a mess, causing more problems than solving them. A problem for one customer might not be a problem for another. Even if two customers have the same problem, the level of the importance of that problem might be different for them. This could happen for various reasons, such as two customers are from different regions or are using the product for different goals.

The dilemma gets even tougher when the business or another product manager asks for a feature they believe will improve the operations or directly increase the revenue. The issue is that sometimes implementing this type of feature might cause a negative user experience.

Assume a scenario in which a product manager responsible for user incentives suggests placing a promotional pop-up on the landing page of your product. However, you have concerns that this might disturb the overall user interaction. A product manager responsible for this type of decision should analyze the situation carefully and try to experiment with small bets but win big by making both the customers happy and the stakeholders satisfied.

The product manager’s role also involves a great deal of communication with customers. Before doing any sort of ideation, an experienced product manager first evaluates who their target customer is and tries to understand their needs and desires. They talk to their customers every week, consistently interviewing them to learn about the pros and cons of their product, discovering if the new ideas are worth building or not, and learning about their competitiveness in the market. This allows the product manager to identify the key activities customers perform or will need to perform with the product and how those activities would improve the customers’ experiences. At this point, it is also vital to analyze whether creating or improving solutions for those activities will boost the metrics that matter for the business the most.

Furthermore, the work of a product manager involves both strategic and tactical roles. One day they might need to discuss the overall product strategy with their managers to align it with the new business objectives and evolving trends in the market. Another day they might need to sit down with their product designer and engineers to discuss why the proposed solution may or may not bring value to the existing customer base. Product people are in a dynamic work environment that requires them to continuously switch from one role to another.

Product managers should also think about both in-depth and full pictures of their products. For instance, a product manager who works for a company like Airbnb might be responsible for the types of filters the product offers its customers for searching apartments. Besides allowing customers to effectively search and book places, the offered solution should also present straightforward logistics, such as meeting the landlords and leaving the lodging.

The product manager takes responsibility for the entire user experience.

Another critical role of a technology product manager is to ensure that the strategy chosen for their product is well aligned to the vision the company tries to achieve. They also need to make sure that the product strategy is concrete and well defined, the product work is strategy-oriented, and the business objectives that the product team is trying to achieve bring them closer to the product vision.

This does not mean that the product strategy has to always be consistently unaltered. Jeff Bezos once said: “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” This amazing quote from the founder of Amazon infers that details - which in this case is our product strategy, might change based on various factors. Some of those factors could be such as new market opportunities, strategic partnerships, evolving trends, and new competitors. Great product managers always keep themselves informed about the latest market and industry changes to keep their product efforts flexible in a way that doesn’t harm their product vision.

To summarize this discussion, I want to highlight that the product manager’s work is more than just forty hours per week job. It requires tremendous effort and persistence. It needs consistent collaboration with engineering and design people and cooperation with other organizational roles. It includes both detail-oriented and visionary thinking, as well as ongoing communication with existing and prospective customers. It takes a lot of effort, but if done correctly, it will yield results worth celebrating.

Characteristics of a Strong Product Manager

A product manager has a lot on their plate, and a lot is going on in their minds too. For this reason, the successful execution of the role requires a mix of various characteristics. Here is what a great product manager needs to be:

• smart but also humble
• persistent but also flexible
• hardworking but also efficient
• visionary but also detail-oriented
• accountable but also empowering

Smart But Also Humble

Product managers are the ultimate problem solvers. The decisions they make on a daily basis might involve a lot of dilemmas and challenges. That is why they need to be extremely sharp-minded. These are the people who have to solve non-trivial problems in non-trivial ways accordingly. And since they have got exceptional challenges to face, they cannot just be smart.

Solving problems is not always easy. It takes in-depth analysis and pattern detection skills. However, your problem-solving talent will not gain full respect from your team if you are arrogant. People identifying you as a smart and intellectual person would love to see you as a great team player too and not someone who boasts about their achievements here and there. Great product managers tend to use the “we” word instead of the “I” when it comes to sharing stories about their achievements. It all takes teamwork and being humble is a step towards effective collaboration.

Persistent But Also Flexible

Everything great usually takes time to achieve. The best education takes years. Scientific discoveries that change people’s lives usually take years. Similarly, building great products also takes time. It means that as a product manager, you need to be persistent. No one said your success is going to be easy or quick or will happen overnight. Normally achieving your desired product and business milestones will take a considerable amount of time and resources.

So, as a product manager, you need to be fully committed to whatever you are doing and whatever product you are building. You need to be persistent when it comes to finding the right solution for the customer’s problem. Note that when exploring the space for potential solutions, it is important to keep the objectivity towards each solution. This is because there might be different solutions for solving the given customer pain. Staying neutral will help you to find the most reasonable one. And if that solution does not feel good enough, you would need to be persistent again to start experimenting and replacing it with a better one.

At the same time, a product manager needs to be flexible too. This need applies to any situation from daily product work to quarterly product strategy. This is because the sudden change of events might affect whatever you are building. Thus, you need to adjust your long-term and short-term strategies to fit these new scenarios and be on the winning side. By saying flexible, I also often imply being agile. When I say that a product manager needs to go agile, I mostly mean being able to adapt to changing situations and act accordingly.

Hardworking But Also Efficient

Product management is not a regular 9 am to 6 pm job. You could be thinking about your product and communicating with people even after work. You might need to spend hours of brainstorming sessions with your product team and stakeholders, eventually missing your lunchtime. Yes, that is what you do when you are a product manager. And it is important to truly love what you are doing to be fully committed to this type of schedule.

At the same time, you need to be efficient. There is a difference between working hard and working smart. Staying up late at night won’t help if you don’t know how to utilize your skills efficiently. Wasting your time on trivial things is not going to bring a lot of value to your product and team. Wasting the time and resources of your product team and eventually bringing no value to the customers will not bring any benefit to your business. So, try not to cross the fine line between hardworking and working efficiency.

Visionary But Also Detail-oriented

Product managers should be the visionaries of their products. Though in some instances, the product vision comes from the leadership, the product manager needs to believe in that vision to evangelize it across and outside the company. If the product manager does not believe in their product vision, how can they empower the entire team to go and achieve that vision? Product managers need to see the big picture and try to predict the future of the market and industry. The world is an ever-changing place, and they need to be prepared for the changes.

Oftentimes, great product makers think a few steps ahead of other people. This helps them know what exactly they need to do to achieve success in the future. However, being a visionary doesn’t only imply being behind great ideas. A product manager needs to be detail-oriented too. Seeing the big picture is great, but being able to execute day-to-day actions is vital as well. So, a product manager should be very detail-oriented to care about every single small detail of their product. Forgetting or not paying attention to the little details can eventually lead to losing the ability to fully comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of the product.

Accountable But Also Empowering

Behind every great product, there is a product manager who felt accountable for the success of that product. Similarly, great product managers feel accountable for the progress of their product team and the entire company. At the same time, they empower their product team to do their best to meet demanding product challenges. They lead the team and empower them towards reaching greatness.

If you view your team as a team composed of superheroes, there is a high chance that they will one day act like superheroes.

It is crucial to lead by example.

Where are Product Managers Coming From?

There is no single modern profession that is known as the most relevant basis for product management. Technology companies tend to hire and train product managers from different backgrounds. Some of those companies have their hiring preferences as well. For instance, technology-driven companies tend to hire product managers that have computer science or engineering degrees. In contrast, there are companies that hire product managers after they finish their MBA programs.

The role of a technology product manager is very modern, shaping various aspects of many professional disciplines. Even though becoming an expert in any of those fields is not a requirement, having strong high-level knowledge in those areas will help the product manager to succeed in their journey. Here I will go through some of those domains, highlighting the key concepts that will be useful to know.

Software Engineering

I know many product managers who come from computer science and engineering backgrounds. In fact, it is one of the most common paths to becoming a product manager. The reason is that as a technology product manager, you are going to interact with technology solutions daily. Therefore, knowing how technology works can be a huge advantage for you. Comprehending the fundamentals of technology will make interaction with engineers way easier.

Understanding the big ideas of computer science and especially software engineering will be a great advantage. A good start could be taking an introductory computer science course either in college or online. CS10 from UC Berkeley or CS50 from Harvard University can be a great start for beginners. Moreover, books such as “Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software” by Charles Petzold and “Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction” by Jerome Saltzer will easily explain the anatomy of software programs.

Note that the goal here is not to become an expert in computer science, but to understand the basics of software engineering, such as how to write and run programs, what are different methodologies and best practices of software development, etc. Understanding the usage of various technologies and languages would be another big plus. This is especially helpful when analyzing what technologies and programming languages are useful for specific engineering scenarios.

As a data-driven product manager, you will need to have enough technical knowledge to work closely with your data. Learning SQL (Structured Query Language) and the basics of database management systems will allow you to query your data directly from databases to get up-to-date information about your customer and operational activity.

Furthermore, learning the basics of Internet protocols such as IP, TCP, FTP, etc. will allow you to understand how Internet-based software solutions work, as well as how client-side programming interacts with server-side programming. To convince yourself of the importance of understanding the high-level concepts of computer science, the book called “Program or Be Programmed” by Douglas Rushkoff would be a great resource.

Product Design

Another common profession that product managers had before pivoting to product management is product design. I have seen many talented product managers who previously were amazing product designers. The reason is that acknowledging the power of great design can help product people a lot when conceptualizing new ideas.

Strong design is an indisputable part of great products. Hence, having advanced design thinking skills and high-level knowledge in designing products is essential for technology product management.

Product managers are heavily involved in processes such as user journey mapping and design sprints, hence it is important to have good expertise in those areas. Product managers also cooperate a lot with product designers when running user research and testing. It is essential for product managers to be proficient with these types of activities, as well as with the different methods that are being used when running those activities.

Note that we don’t expect a product manager to become a product design expert as it is not part of their job. Nevertheless, a great starting point for product managers will be the ability to differentiate good interactions from bad ones, being able to understand the meanings and usages of visual components, and the ability to have a good working experience with design artifacts, such as sketches and wireframes. Cooperating closely with your product designer will probably be the best resource for you to improve your design thinking skills — so take full advantage of that.

There are various resources online that will keep you updated with the recent trends in product design since it is a quickly evolving discipline with new ideas and practices daily. It would be a good idea to keep yourself updated with the latest innovations in this discipline. Medium, in fact, is one of the best places to find high-quality publications about product design. Publications such as UX Collective and UX Planet are two of those amazing resources.

Additionally, books such as “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman and “Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams” by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden could be great materials if you want to learn about the practical aspects of user experience design.

Product Marketing

Product management has strong connections with product marketing as these two disciplines used to be covered by the same organizational role called brand manager several decades ago. Throughout time product management has become an independent profession, and many practices are still relevant both for product managers and product marketing managers. Although product marketing specialists are usually not part of product teams, they interact with product managers frequently. This is why it is helpful for product managers to have a good understanding of the common concepts in product marketing.

Product messaging techniques are one of the practices that combine both product managers and product marketers. Building successful technology products is important, but it is also essential that we effectively market those products. Part of that marketing strategy is product messaging, which is the way we present the value of our product to the customer. We will need to make it efficient and original, and the product manager has a lot to contribute here.

Learning the practices of go-to-market strategy is another important domain that can be very helpful for product managers. The go-to-market strategy is an action plan that describes how a company or product will reach target customers and achieve competitive advantages. Since this is strongly connected to product strategy, product managers are going to work closely with product marketing managers to improve their go-to-market plan.

Having experience with customer acquisition strategies is another valuable skill for product managers. It demonstrates how well product people are aware of their target audience and whether they have done their homework regarding acquisition techniques or not. An equally important practice is knowing how to measure the effectiveness of the customer acquisition process.

A standard online product marketing course will cover valuable information on all the above-mentioned marketing techniques. For beginners, the HubSpot Academy offers practical courses about general marketing strategy and additional topics such as search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing.

For people who want to go more advanced, books such as “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, “Traction” by Gino Wickman, and “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick are must-read resources.

Business and Finance

I have seen many professionals pivoting to product management after being in business and corporate finance for several years. Everything product managers build for their customers needs to contribute to the growth of the business somehow. This is the reason why product managers need to be well aware of how the technology business makes money, as well as the business metrics that contribute to the growth of the company.

There are various business and finance metrics that are commonly used in the product manager’s daily work. Metrics such as customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and average revenue per customer tell about the profitability of each customer to the business. Metrics such as monthly (annually) recurring revenue and contribution margin tell about the revenue growth of the business.

Product managers also work closely with finance people when analyzing the financial projections of the product in the upcoming quarters. Finance people can be a great resource for you to learn about these types of things. Be sure to communicate with them often.

An introductory online course about finance can be a great start. Udemy provides awesome online courses about financial modeling, analysis, and accounting. These are some great resources that will give you enough background information about business and finance concepts.

If you want to go deeper, books such as “Financial Intelligence, Revised Edition: A Manager’s Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean” by Karen Berman and “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt are great materials.

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About The Author

Rafayel Mkrtchyan is a product management advisor who helps companies improve their product discovery and delivery processes. He teaches teams how to set up a winning product strategy and sustainable growth model, run customer and product development processes, develop outcome-, experiment-, and data-driven mindset, as well as robust their lean, agile, and design thinking skills.

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