Product Management in Practice

Chapter 1. The Practice of Product Management

I recently asked Pradeep GanapathyRaj, director of product management at Yammer, what he wished that every new product management hire understood about their responsibilities. Here are his answers:

• Bringing out the best in the people on your team

• Working with people outside of your immediate team, who are not directly incentivized to work with you

• Dealing with ambiguity

On his third point, he added: “The skill of actually figuring out what you need is probably as important as what you do after you figure it out.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about these answers is that none of them are about product, per se. Although many people are drawn to product management by the promise of “building products that people love,” the day-to-day practice of product management involves much less actual building than it does supporting, facilitating, and communicating. In this chapter, we discuss the actual, real-world practice of product management, and address a few common traps that product managers fall into when their expectations of the role don’t line up with the reality.

What Is Product Management?

So, what exactly does a product manager do all day, anyhow?

The answer to that question depends on a lot of things. At a small startup, you might find a product manager cobbling together product mock-ups, scheduling check-in points with contract developers, and conducting informal interviews with potential users. At a medium-sized technology ...