The product management workflow

A product manager is like a movie director who knows all about the movie and tells everyone what to do.

Product management is a leadership role. A product manager is the CEO of a product, who has full responsibility for the success of the product. Success primarily means that the product will be able to win long-term, happy, and satisfied clients in a profitable manner.

Product management covers everything about the product including what features are to be built or improved and who will use the product and why. You, as a product manager, describe the product features, set priorities, and prepare a roadmap of developing product features.

The most important aspect of product management is to collaborate cross-functionally with all teams so that everyone has clarity about what needs to be done. Product manager acts as a liaison between engineering and other teams to help translate the vision and inner-workings of the product, in both directions.

This role also involves ethics. You’re responsible for the ethical consequences of your product as well as the way your teams build it.

Product management for tech and startup companies

Although product management is required in almost every market and industry, yet the most important and challenging product management applications are in startups and technology businesses. That’s because the technology landscape is constantly changing and tech startups have to remain on the cutting edge of evolution and advancement.

The workflow diagram for product management

1. Identify features

It starts with identifying features of the product. Features define the functionality and therefore are part of the product management core.

2. Collaborate cross-functionally with all teams

As soon as you identify a feature, you need to discuss the functionality with all your teams. 

3. Identify users along with their pain points

If we want to keep our users happy, we should know the reasons why they use our product. People love products that solve their problems or provide relief to their pain points.

Notice the bold red arrow that goes from task 3 to 1 in the workflow diagram. This means while you will proceed from 3 to 4, you will also go back to 1 at the same time and find some more features. Similarly, follow all the bold red arrows in the diagram back to task 1.

4. You collaborate continually to tell everyone about your features, users, and their pain points.

5. Group users according to their issues and pain points

Once you have identified users and some of their issues, you should start grouping users according to their requirements and problems.

6. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

7. Evaluate the importance of each user group and prioritize

Product managers always have more problems to solve than the resources required. And hence the need to prioritize. This gives us a roadmap of features to be developed and released.

9. Analyze competitors and markets  

You need to know what’s happening in the market, what type of competitor products and features are being launched, how users are responding to all the new changes, how well your product fits into the market, and how it compares to competing products. Product Managers do this while working together with the marketing and business development teams.

11. Write user stories and draw wireframes and mockups

Product management includes defining the “what” needs to be built (as opposed to how). Product managers do this by writing user stories and drawing mockups.

13. Oversee the implementation, testing, and release of a feature

You make sure that the design, architecture, development, and technical teams know the product requirements without ambiguity. You also ensure that features are being developed according to user stories and mockups.

Product managers don’t directly get involved or participate in technical matters such as technology, architecture, or software development. You leave those to their respective teams.

About Bilal Siddiqui:  I have over a decade’s experience in product management and I’ve designed many courses for professionals. 

I’m an expert on user research and identifying customers’ pain points. I’ve done many projects that involve sales, marketing, business development, social media integration, online advertising, product vision, UI/UX, CRM, customer retention programs, and inbound content-based workflows to reach out to customers. 

I’ve been a product leader for B2B, B2C, SaaS, PaaS, API, subscription-based, and other software applications for more than a decade. I routinely collaborate cross-functionally with internal and external stakeholders. I have owned, designed, promoted, managed, built, and launched products from scratch (POC, startup, MVP, more features, and so on).

 

My PDF resume: Bilal-Siddiqui-Resume-20210901.pdf

My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilal-siddiqui-28b79922/

Email: ConvincingSolutions@yahoo.com

Skype ID: ConvincingSolutions