Product Management Roles

Every company has goals that it wants to achieve. The leadership team comes up with them. For example- they might say that the goal is to increase revenue by 20% in the next financial year. That becomes the company goal.

The goal is then broken down into smaller parts. Every team in an organisation has a focus area based on company goals. The cumulative effect of each team’s work is the performance of the organisation. How much of that 20% is going to come from acquiring new customers, renewing existing subscriptions or reducing churn? Which teams can best lead each of these? That comes down to roles and responsibilities of each team which gets down to that of each member of the team.

The product management team’s roles and responsibilities are derived in the same way starting at the very top.

Let’s get familiar with the product organisation before diving deeper into each role.

Product Management Organisational Structure

The product team is a nimble unit. The structure will vary depending on the size of the company. Let’s look at each.

Early Stage Startups (<10 employees)

The CEO is the product manager for the company. He works with his CTO to build the initial proof of concept to find the product market fit.

Small Companies (10-25 employees)

A Senior Product Manager works with the CEO to define the roadmap to achieve the vision for the company.

Medium Size Companies (25-100)

This is the stage where the product organisation starts to grown. It’s led by the Director of Product Management reporting to the CEO. Their direct reportees include both product managers and designers.

Large Organizations (100+)

A full fledged product organisation is headed by the Chief Product Officer(CPO). His direct reportees might lead the product, design,operations and data teams. You will see different permutations and combinations in your career. As discussed above it is again driven by goals assigned to each team.

Goals of a Product Management Team

Let’s look at some common goals for product teams

Retention

Acquiring customers is not easy. But losing is! The product team needs to identify problems that existing customers face. It can be a bug in an existing feature or the absence of certain functionality. There will always be customers who churn. You have to keep them excited about the product that they use today and what the future roadmap holds.

User Acquisition

The cost of acquisition (CAC) is a big expense for any company. All the teams work together to convert leads into paying customers. Product team strives to deliver a product roadmap that excites prospects when they compare it to alternatives.

Customer Satisfaction

Does your product gets the job done? Or is it more than that. Your customers need to feel that your product is irreplaceable. So much so that if they leave the company they will become evangelists for it in their new organisation. Qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers at a regular cadence helps do this.

Getting Prioritisation Right

The toughest thing you will do as a product manager is to decide:

This means  you will be ”saying no as a product manager” a lot! We wrote a blog to help you do it with finesse!

It’s only when you build what’s right for the users that you will succeed.

KPIs for Product Team

KPI’s stand for “Key Performance Indicators”. They are often misunderstood and used interchangeably with Goals. KPI is the metric you define to track whether your goal is being achieved. For example:

Goal: Increase user acquisition by 17%

KPIs: Numbers of users:

Actions you believe will achieve the goal are your KPIs. In the above example the product team believes that users who complete either of the above three things will convert lead into a customer.

How do you come up with KPIs? You use historical data and understanding of customers to build KPIs. You might start with KPIs but then realise that your data tells you a completely different story. For example your data might suggest that there is no correlation between the time people spend on the site and conversion. In that case change your KPIs. But don’t misuse it to change KPIs that you are finding difficult to meet 😊

Roles & Responsibilities

Product Managers juggle a lot of different responsibilities each day. We wrote a blog earlier to go over things product managers do. It will give you an idea of what it encompasses. The role does change overtime from an individual contributor to a people manager.  Eventually you will join the leadership team of your organisation. and lead the product vision and strategy.

Let’s look at different roles that make up the product management team.

Associate Product Manager(APM)

This is an entry level opportunity for anyone looking to start fresh. You start with handling small bugs and updates before graduating to take on full releases. Google has a great APM program which focuses on building the next generation of product leaders.

As an APM, a good way to start out is by shadowing an experienced product manager for a few months. It enables you to learn on the job while having support of someone who has been there done that! You start learning the strategic and tactical parts of the job like:

You learn a lot and will have questions. Make sure to speak up and ask them. Don’t be shy. There are no wrong questions in this business 😊 . You will also bring in a fresh perspective. Use that to make an impact on the roadmap of the product.

Product Manager(PM)

You will need a couple of years under your belt in product related roles to become a product manager. Associate Product Manager roles are generally not as widespread especially in smaller companies. Your path to becoming a product manager might start as a Business Analyst(BA) or Quality Assurance Engineer(QA) or Sales Engineer.  Any role where you develop a deep understanding of the customers is a great stepping stone for transitioning into this role.

In this role you will collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to deliver the roadmap. The roadmap can be of the complete product, part of a larger product, or a new product that you are building. In larger companies it is common to have more than a couple of product managers responsible for the same product. For example- if your company has a mobile app there might be separate product managers for the home page, search results page, ads on the app etc.

Product Owner(PO)

This is often used interchangeably with a product manager. If you work for a small company chances are that you might be doing both roles. The primary responsibility of the PO is to manage the downstream work of product management. The PO is someone who has strong technical and project management skills. Some things that they focus on are:

Senior Product Manager

Up until this stage  product managers are individual contributors. Their key focus has been the product. In a Senior Product Manager role they start taking up responsibilities that prepare them to become great people managers. They start mentoring product managers and in some cases managing APMs. This helps them understand the new set of challenges that come with managing people.

Director of Product Management

You lead the product organisation in this role. Your focus shifts away from the daily activities of product releases to:

Chief Product Officer

In large companies CPO lead the product management, operations and design teams. They work with the CEO to define the growth roadmap for the company. The responsibilities of this role varies within each organisation.

We hope that this gives you a basic understanding of the structure of a product organisation. And you are excited to embark on your product management journey. Reach out to us if you have any questions!