Product Management

Product Management: The Art of Connecting and Aligning

How does a product manager successfully connect and align their team? By leveraging the CORE skills of product management: communication, organization, research, and execution

Communication

Facilitate strong and clear communication between designers, developers, business stakeholders, and users.

Research

Proactively seek out new information, to keep their products up-to-date and relevant to their users.

Organization

Organize their product teams for speed, scale, and success. This often involves leveraging methodologies such as Agile and Lean.

Execution

Do whatever work is needed to ensure that their team succeeds. This could mean everything from going on early morning coffee runs for developers to attending important strategic meetings with senior executives.

Product management is:

• Connects and aligns developers and designers with business goals and user needs
• Can be defined very differently from organization to organization
• Requires varying technical knowledge depending on the product and industry

Product management is not:

• Another name for a developer, designer, business analyst, or user researcher
• A role with formal organizational authority (“the boss”)
• A purely technical role

One of a product manager’s most important jobs is to make sure that user needs and business goals are aligned in the decisions made by the ...