Working in product management over the past year after spending years in development management, there are a few thing that i have found that drive me insane. The biggest one being the fact that product management in some companies is a mystical position that no one really knows the point of. A lot of companies treat their product manager as delivery managers for the “mothership” that is usually based in the US. Now from personal experience i can say that being a delivery manager as well as a product manager is an extremely hard slog. Not only do you have to write business cases, write PRDs, concern yourself over the user experience, legal implications and marketing message, you have to spend half of your time on development /QA calls answering and querying strabge questions and answers.
I guess the quesion comes to how do you break down the tasks of a product manager to get the most out of them. I think that a product manager really should be a more commercial person who looks at the market, identifies a gap / opportunity, writes the business case and gets the product up and running, and then they should be coupled with a product delivery manager, that goes on QA and Dev calls to ensure things are running to schedule and to functional plan. While this work is happening the product manager should be working with marketing to position and promote the product. The delivery manager should then implement the launch.
As for in life management of the product – this is where i get unstuck. Can the product manager devote time to supporting and listening to their users – or should the delivery manager take over this responsibility and report back anything significant to the product manager?
I am open to suggestion on that one.
