I’m in love with this thing called “Product Management”
I remember the first time I came across the word “product management/manager”, I fell so deeply connected with the word alone even before learning one or two about what it really means. Sometime in 2020, I was a campus ambassador for Barter app , a cross border and transfer payment app by Flutterwave, which is actually and coincidentally going through a product revamp — I guess that’s what they call it in product management; as at the time of writing this.
Before meeting PM (by the way, I will be using PM to replace Product Management in some instances), I considered myself to be a tech-preneur; using technology to solve or create business solutions.. I had always been involved in anything tech since i was a young boy and i had always loved and studied business and finance as well, I’ve always wanted to become an entrepreneur; creating products and services that satisfies customers and also generating employment opportunities. This pushed me to study Management Information System rather than Business Administration/Finance which i initially enrolled for, there has been no regrets by the way. ☺️It is pertinent to note that creating, building and managing business solutions is at the core of product management.
So my first real encounter of PM was a training/webinar anchored by Oluwatobi Otokiti who was the Barter Ambassador Program Lead and also a Senior Product Manager at Flutterwave at the time and also currently the founder of Product Dive, the largest product management community and school in Africa. Her justifications of what PM is and the roles of a product manager made me realize that I was built for this. I just recently enrolled in a 2–weeks boot-camp organized by Axia Africa where we are being mentored and trained on PM what surrounds it. I will be sharing my journey here to let newbies like me understand better what it means to be a PM and also for accountability.
In our first lesson, we learnt a basic introduction of product management and the different roles of a product manager. A basic understanding of product management is that it has to do with the creation and management of a product. Every product starts with an idea or assumption, this idea is validated, scrutinized and using tools like market research, competitive analysis, roadmaps and data analysis births the launch and management of a product.
One key thing that stood out for me is the fact that “Product Management has to be user/customer focused”, a product cannot be built without the users in mind, without users there is no product and a product is not market fit if it has not gone through the user process. The process of idea validation helps you understand if an idea is going to solve the users problems or if it creates a viable solution.
Some of the roles of a PM includes managing the product lifecycle and process from ideation to validation to research to creating strategy, building, launching, marketing and getting feedback to improve. A PM is responsible for creating the overall strategy of the product, developing product requirements and roadmaps, prioritizing features and most importantly working with cross-functional teams like design, engineering, marketing, sales and peoples departments. A PM also manages product performance, growth, marketing, customers feedback and even hiring the right people who would share the same vision.
One thing I didn’t know before is the different types of Product Managers, i learnt that there are various designations of PMs, we have the technical product managers with little or much background in engineering, product analysts who are basically very much into creating and interpreting product data, product growth managers tasked with the wheels of growing the products, we also have product agile managers or scrum masters that acts as project managers in a product, strategic product managers specializes in creating product strategies and roadmaps.
In conclusion, i believe that PMs are at the core of a business solution or a company’s offerings, they shape the birth and death, success and failure of a product or service. PMs are also the customers or users representative when it comes to building solutions and solving users problems. Today, i pledge that i will do my best, to become a well-responsible Product Manager, to have a product-like concern for all customers, to promote the importance of solving users problems all around the world and to work with others in creating customer-centric products. So help me God. Look out for my next post on Market Research and Customer Development.