Great Customer Experience Starts with Product Management

Chapter 1. Great Customer Experience Starts with Product Management

What Is Product Management?

In the last few decades, product management has emerged as a critical role for any organization building products or experiences. The day-to-day work of product management varies widely from organization to organization, but the mandate for product managers is consistent: to connect and align internal stakeholders around the goals of your business, and to make sure that those goals are aligned with the needs of your customers.

As illustrated in Figure 1-1, this often means working with the designers and developers charged with actually building and maintaining a product, as well as any other stakeholders (such as business analysts) working on that particular product team. Depending on the specifics of the organization and the product, a product manager might oversee the roadmap for their specific product, conduct research to understand the competitive landscape, and manage the day-to-day workings of the product team using an Agile process such as Scrum or XP.

Figure 1-1. Product management sitting between business, design, and technology

A product manager’s connective responsibilities also extend beyond their immediate product team. As illustrated in Figure 1-2, product managers must also connect and align between their team and other product teams, as well as the executives who generally ...