The Elements of Voice First Style

Chapter 23. The Elements of Deployment

Successfully launching any product, digital or physical, requires a team of several talented professionals, each proficient in their own specialty, working collaboratively toward a common goal, with a common timeline, and enabled by a product manager who does their job just as professionally as any other member of the team: they provide a clear, exciting vision, help plan and organize, and ensure that everyone stays focused by protecting and empowering the members of the team.

In this chapter, we go over the roles that one finds in a typical product team.

Product Management

The product manager, also sometimes referred to as the product owner, is the person to whom the glory goes if the product succeeds, and the shame if the product fails. The buck stops with the product manager.

The very first step that a product manager must take to set the project on a path toward success is to ensure that every single member of the team understands what each other member of that team does and why the role of that member, and therefore the member themself, is important to delivering a high-quality product.

In fact, one of the product manager’s primary tasks throughout the delivery of a product is to detect gaps in such understanding. For instance, an engineer may be fuzzy about who is supposed to come up with the functional requirements (that would be the product manager), or a quality engineer may not know who to pull into the conversation when they have ...