The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management

The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management In Brief

Product Management is a highly exciting and rewarding career path. The versatility of the domains of Product Management explains this fact. Indeed, historically, Product management is the intersection between The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management that are: Business, Tech and User Experience (UX). During the last couple of decades, a fourth domain showed up in addition to the previous 3 ones, that is Data.

This post illustrates the four major domains of Product Management. These four domains are Business, Tech, UX and Data.

A Product Manager is known to be as “Jack of all trades, master of none”. This statement summarizes the essence of this job. Indeed, a Product Manager should have a broad knowledge of cross-disciplinary fields, that are often of very different natures. These fields contain 4 classes that are: Business, Tech, User Experience (UX) and Data.

1st Domain: Business

Business starts The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management. A Product Manager should have solid business knowledge. Indeed, the very first purpose of any Product Manager is the success of the product. Even if success criteria differ considerably from case to case, a major one is undoubtedly the business success.

Even when the success criterion for the product is not the business criterion, the Product Manager is still requested to have considerable business knowledge. This is because he very often has to communicate with business stakeholders like salespeople, marketers and executives.

The business knowledge that a Product Manager should have encompasses: Market and competitive intelligence, user research, strategic planning, marketing, financials, accounting, sales, public speaking, copywriting, and business planning.

Market and competitive intelligence:

This contains all the know-how and solutions for gathering actional data and insight for taking the right decisions at the right time. This is the flashlight that the Product Manager has to make his way along the dark forests of the Tech world.

User Research:

This belongs to the previous category, but since it’s so important, it’s worth putting it on its own. This is about gathering actionable information about the users. This encompasses the user’s demography, pains, desires as well as social and professional profiles.

Strategic planning:

This part contains the mid and long-term thinking and planning. It’s about setting on paper the vision and action plan through a given timeline. Numerous tools and frameworks are used by Product Managers in this purpose like roadmapping, business analysis models analysis like SWOT (Strength Weakness Opportunities and Threats) and PESTLE (Political, Environmental, Social, Technological, Legal) analysis.

Marketing:

It’s about grasping the knowledge behind how to gain awareness and desire around the product. Marketing is also about how to build an inspiring and strong brand image. Marketing is vital for the growth and sustainability of the product.

Financials & Accounting:

A Product Manager is not meant to be an expert in accounting but knowing how to interpret a Balance Sheet, an Income Statement or the financial ratios of a business can bring invaluable insights for him to make the right decision in making or killing a product at the right time.

Sales:

Sales is a key domain for a Product Manager. Indeed, even if he will not directly sell the product, he needs to understand what makes a successful sale, he needs to communicate efficiently with salespeople and provide them with the right information at the right time. Very often, the Product Manager is also involved in the sales process, so he needs to be convincing and a master of the value proposition of his product.

Public speaking:

This stands for is the ability to speak and convince publicly in front of audiences of all sizes. Public speaking is also a key skill for motivating the troops internally. In short, it’s a golden leadership skill that make the top 1% Product Managers.

Copywriting:

This is about having the ability to convince through writing. It’s meant for convincing internal stakeholders to consider a feature as a higher priority than another, convincing leads to purchase, convincing potential partners to join or having the buy-in of the C-Suite.

Business Planning:

Product Management is like being the CEO of the product. It also requires a high-level mindset of entrepreneurship. Product Management is about planning and connecting internal and external stakeholders to the market needs. Consequently, a Product Manager is expected to provide a high throughput of information. A common tool for summarizing a considerable amount of the expected input is the Business Plan.

Product Planning:

Product Planning is like the Business Plan for Product Managers. It contains all the needed information for planning the product conceptualization, building, pricing, launch and maintenance through time. Roadmapping for instance is part of the product planning. Product Planning, like roadmapping, is not a one shot action, but it’s more of an iterative process.

2nd Domain: Tech

Tech is the second pillar among The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management. It’s very obvious to say that a Tech Product Manager should have a decent knowledge about Tech. He’s not meant to be an expert in coding nor a senior software developer. What he does need to know is the inputs and outputs of each and every feature of the product, the difficulty for developing a given piece of code, what are the best tech profiles to put for resolving a given issue.

In addition, a Product Manager should know the language of Tech and its main components. For instance, he should grasp the ins and outs of the internet, how an online request works, how servers work behind the scenes, and what is the difference between front-end and back-end technologies.

He should also understand the value proposition of the latest technologies like the Cloud, the Blockchain, the Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), the container-based deployment, an Application Programming Interface (API) and REST APIs.

3rd Domain: User Experience (UX)

The User Experience, or UX, is the mindset and philosophy of taking the psychology of the user into account when developing the product. UX refers to how to maximize the positive feeling of the user during his journey with the product.

This journey starts way before the first interaction with the product. Indeed, the UX starts since the user hears about the product for the first time. It starts with the first banner, ad or recommendation that the user encountered to get to know the product. This journey goes then until the first interaction of the user with the product, his adoption of the product and his experience with the customer service of the product.

Customer service plays a key role during the UX journey. In fact, one major goal of UX is to minimize the frustration to the user and maximize his satisfaction. A user usually contacts the customer service when things are going wrong. This is where the customer service team whether it’s human or robotic should maximize the positive feelings of the user and answer effectively and efficiently to his request.

4th Domain: Data

Historically, the Product Management domains are defined by the three above. Data is a fourth domain that is particularly relevant with the products that evolve around Data, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

These kinds of products are increasingly in demand on the market. This is due to the high volumes of data that organizations are collecting through the internet, the IoT (Internet of Things) or through simulation.

Data is considered as a major asset and a key differentiator in many industries. This is because data provides the ability to make better decisions and to tailor more relevant products for the adequate customers.

For it to be useful and relevant, the considered Data for feeding a given product should obey the 5 Vs criterion. The 5 Vs are: Volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value.

Volume

Volume refers to the quantity of the data. The more data, the more information and the more potential value to be extracted.

Velocity

Velocity is about the speed at which the data is interacting with the product. The faster the velocity is, the more sophisticated software and hardware tools should be involved in order to keep the product running with a good UX. The two extreme cases of data velocity are: Real time data and historical data.

Variety

Variety is about having data covering a relevant range of cases that is relevant with respect to the scope of the product that it will serve. For example, if a product is expected to provide a service for a population having the age ranging between 18 and 60 years old, then the used data should cover finely this range of ages that are expected to behave differently to a considered subject.

Veracity

It’s obvious that quantity without quality does not make useful data, and this is what is meant by Veracity.

Value

The final aim, for a Product Manager, behind using data in his product is to deliver value and solve problems for his customer. This is what is meant by value. For instance, if the data obeys to the four previous criteria and measures the water temperature around an isolated island in the Indian Ocean, then this data will be of no value to a Product Manager that aims to build a product that predicts the probability of fraud for a financial institution.

The 4 Crucial Pillars of Product Management For Tech Businesses