Product Manager IT projects

Author of the article: Veronika Pisarenko

S7 Priority PM, business tracker

Product Manager – holder of one or more products. He is responsible for managing the product from the beginning to the end of its life cycle. The product is the link between the company and clients (company employees can also be considered clients). It is he who creates products that meet the needs of the market and users, or develops existing ones (depending on the product life cycle).

The main tasks of a product manager:

• analyzes the target audience of the product and identifies its needs in order to cover them with the functionality of the product;

• defines product strategy;

• forms a financial model that reflects the value of the product for the company;

• describes business requirements for the functionality and final implementation of the product. Forms a pool of development tasks (=project backlog);

• prioritizes (determines/sets priorities) tasks according to the degree of influence on key metrics;

• determines product KPIs and monitors their implementation;

• tunes/challenges the functionality of existing interfaces, backend, and even in some cases (cases) stack;

• optimizes cross-functional interaction processes;

• conducts A/B testing of improvements.

The goal of a product manager is to create or develop a company’s product in such a way that it generates income, attracts and retains customers due to its value. The value can be different, such as speed of operation, convenience for users, obviously financial and others.

Depending on the company, industry and specifics, the product may be:

1. A ready-made solution, for example, an IT system that a company sells to other client companies.

2. Mobile application or website as a point of interaction with customers.

3. A component of an IT system or service, for example, a chatbot inside a mobile phone. applications or search inside SberMegaMarket, unified user authentication in all applications and services of the company.

4. A specific category of product or service in the company’s portfolio, for example, fast delivery of goods through OZON fresh within OZON.

I will also give a comparison of concepts “product” and “project”

• A product is an independent tangible or intangible solution that is used as a way to generate profit through creating value for customers (for example, a company sells a product or service to external clients), or performs a certain functionality, or a pool of tasks as a system for internal use by company employees (internal customers).

• A project is one or more tasks in the process of implementing a product, limited by the following resources – budget, time, human and technological.

Project Unlike product has an explicit termination point. the product may be final at some date, but does not exclude further development and change.

Let’s look at examples from the IT sector.

The product can be a CRM system that the company offers to other companies through a subscription model. Projects for such a product could be:

• development of a viable MVP product;

• adding the function of conducting audio and video calls within the CRM system;

• adding a sales and funnel analytics module;

• integration with client company websites to collect data on leads;

• optimization of the process of acquiring new clients and further migration of the existing client base to the updated process.

To launch a new product or scale an existing company, you need specialists in 2 roles – Product Manager and Project Manager.

What is the difference between their functionality?

In a nutshell, the first manages the entire product (in the example above, the CRM system), and the second manages the project as part of the product (additions within the product). The product answers the questions “What will we do?”, “Why will we do this?”, and the project answers the questions “How exactly will we do it?”, “Why will we do it this way?”, “When will we implement it?” ?”, “Who will do this?”

Below is a more detailed comparison of these roles:

However, it often happens that companies (especially IT) hire one person who immediately covers the tasks of both the product manager and the project manager in one person.

To get such a (combined) position, you need to have not only soft skills, but also hard skills that will help initiate and carry out the development of software and IT products. These competencies include:

• Ability to analyze data and make decisions based on data, use HADI cycles in decision making;

• Product roadmap development and management;

• High-level assessment of tasks (for example, according to the Reach * Impact * Confidence\Effort and Influence + Confidence + Effort models);

• Preparation of functional requirements;

• Managing a development team based on Agile and/or Scrum, but not limited to these tools, Waterfall is also allowed to be used, although it has faded into the background lately.

Since in this situation the product manager is the link not only between the business and clients, but also developers, he must be able to effectively interact with a team of devops, testers and analysts to ensure the implementation of tasks in accordance with the product roadmap. Communication skills and task prioritization help with this.

My friends from OTUS tell me more about the Product manager profession in IT as part of the course of the same name. The course includes a number of free webinars for which you can register now. December 6 colleagues will tell How can a new product get an offer?A 13.12 about AI tools in the work of a product manager.