How to Be a Product Manager 2021

How to Be a Product Manager 2021

By Joshua Pielago, Managing Director - Lokal

Introduction

This page is updated as new trends, courses, and other significant information emerge.

Latest Update: February 25, 2021


This guide was written to provide information on how you can start in your career as a Product Manager. I wrote this with the perspective of the Philippine software industry, although a lot of the information here applies regardless of the country. 

Product managers comes in all shapes and sizes. In the advent of tech companies and startups, the role has become more prominent, even in the Philippines where the nascent startup scene has been bubbling for years.

This guide is written through the help of the community in Product PH and the Startup Community in the Philippines for current and future Product Managers. Our goal is to create a comprehensive guide about Product Management that would be constantly updated and will be constantly relevant for both old and new Product Managers.

For any comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me here.

What is a Product Manager?

Product Manager Guide 2019
The main role of product managers is to guide the success of a product and to lead the cross-functional teams that build and improve the product.  It is considered to be a key organisational role — especially in development companies — that sets the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for a product or product line. The position sometimes requires marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. The role varies in scope and focus depending on the company, but across all companies, Product Managers always are in the position of ownership and responsibility of their products. 

Product managers provide the deep product expertise needed to lead teams to success. Normally a role that has seniority but lacks direct authority over any personnel, Product Managers need higher level of communication skills, leadership, and stakeholder management to do well in their role.
Product Manager Guide 2019
Product Manager Guide 2019
The role of a product manager changes depending on the type of organization and the size of the organization. In Facebook, where a product manager is just one in the many, many people working in the Product team, product managers are more specialized and skew more in Research, Data Analytics, and the core product management discipline. Compare that to a small startup where a product manager would typically handle everything from project management to product demos.

Nonetheless, most product managers are rooted in certain core items they are responsible for. Here are the core aspects of product leadership that all product managers are accountable for:

A Brief Overview : Vision and Strategy, Ideation and Prioritisation, Communication and Stakeholder Management & Releases

Ideation and Prioritisation 
Product Managers are not responsible to come up with ideas for their product. Rather, Product Managers owns the process of ideation - collecting all the ideas of the entire team, and figuring out which ones makes sense through data analysis, impact analysis, and aligning towards the vision.

Managing and prioritizing ideas for the organization is the key for a Product Manager. Being able to say no to ideas and making sure the entire team is focused is the result. They own the creative process of generating, developing, and curating new ideas. But in order achieve key objectives for the product line and business, a product manager must first determine which ideas should be promoted into features to push the product strategy forward. They must ensure that feedback and requests are seamlessly integrated into their product planning and development processes to get a progressive output. Product managers are then required to communicate the status of ideas back to the customers, partners, and internal team members who submitted them.
Releases
One of the trickiest tasks that product managers must execute is to plan what their teams will deliver, and then pivot as the landscape changes. Iteration and dynamic prioritization are hallmarks of a Product Manager in a tech environment. This holds true no matter which development methodology the engineering team uses. The product manager is responsible for defining the release process and coordinating all of the activities required to bring the product to market. This involves bridging gaps between different functions within the company and aligning all of the teams involved — namely marketing, sales, and customer support. Responsibilities also include managing dependencies in and across releases to complete release phases and milestones.
A Brief Overview : Vision and Strategy, Ideation and Prioritisation, Communication and Stakeholder Management & Releases
Vision and Strategy
Product Managers across all companies have the direct responsibility to provide the vision for the product and come up with the strategy to achieve that vision. The key is to clearly articulate the business value to key stakeholders so they understand the intent behind the new product or product release. Getting the buy in of all teams for the strategy, being able to prove the value of a feature or a requirement, then being able to create a roadmap that goes with the strategy goes a really long way in making a product successful.

Successful product managers have clear visions of where their products are going to be, but are also adept in revising tactics and strategy when current circumstances require so.
Communication and Stakeholder Management
Product Managers, are above all else, quarterbacks of the entire software team. And as quarterbacks, their main goal is to communicate to every stakeholder what needs to be done, what is the impact of each decision, and the value of the features or projects they are working on. This includes communicating to team members, and communicating up to stakeholders. 

Excellent Product Managers keep every team member and stakeholder abreast of the important items happening to the product, and the impact of each decision towards the company's goals.

A Brief Overview : Vision and Strategy, Ideation and Prioritisation, Communication and Stakeholder Management & Releases

A Brief Overview : Vision and Strategy, Ideation and Prioritisation, Communication and Stakeholder Management & Releases

A Brief Overview : Vision and Strategy
Vision and Strategy
Product Managers across all companies have the direct responsibility to provide the vision for the product and come up with the strategy to achieve that vision. The key is to clearly articulate the business value to key stakeholders so they understand the intent behind the new product or product release. Getting the buy in of all teams for the strategy, being able to prove the value of a feature or a requirement, then being able to create a roadmap that goes with the strategy goes a really long way in making a product successful.

Successful product managers have clear visions of where their products are going to be, but are also adept in revising tactics and strategy when current circumstances require so.
A Brief Overview : Ideation and Prioritisation
Ideation and Prioritisation 
Product Managers are not responsible to come up with ideas for their product. Rather, Product Managers owns the process of ideation - collecting all the ideas of the entire team, and figuring out which ones makes sense through data analysis, impact analysis, and aligning towards the vision.

Managing and prioritizing ideas for the organization is the key for a Product Manager. Being able to say no to ideas and making sure the entire team is focused is the result. They own the creative process of generating, developing, and curating new ideas. But in order achieve key objectives for the product line and business, a product manager must first determine which ideas should be promoted into features to push the product strategy forward. They must ensure that feedback and requests are seamlessly integrated into their product planning and development processes to get a progressive output. Product managers are then required to communicate the status of ideas back to the customers, partners, and internal team members who submitted them.
A Brief Overview : Communication and Stakeholder Management
Communication and Stakeholder Management
Product Managers, are above all else, quarterbacks of the entire software team. And as quarterbacks, their main goal is to communicate to every stakeholder what needs to be done, what is the impact of each decision, and the value of the features or projects they are working on. This includes communicating to team members, and communicating up to stakeholders. 

Excellent Product Managers keep every team member and stakeholder abreast of the important items happening to the product, and the impact of each decision towards the company's goals.
A Brief Overview : Release
Releases
One of the trickiest tasks that product managers must execute is to plan what their teams will deliver, and then pivot as the landscape changes. Iteration and dynamic prioritization are hallmarks of a Product Manager in a tech environment. This holds true no matter which development methodology the engineering team uses. The product manager is responsible for defining the release process and coordinating all of the activities required to bring the product to market. This involves bridging gaps between different functions within the company and aligning all of the teams involved — namely marketing, sales, and customer support. Responsibilities also include managing dependencies in and across releases to complete release phases and milestones.
Great Resources on Learning About Product Managers

How do you get into Product Management? 

Product Managers need to walk the line between technology, design, and business. When hiring straight from college, the best courses are typically the ones that are more immersed in business and tech, but do not lean specifically on one way or another. Nonetheless, many in the field have been successful due to their own merits and not because of their education. It is not uncommon to see product managers who come from liberal arts background, although such backgrounds require extensive immersion in tech.

Here are the common ways people get into Product Management
On-the-job Training
On-the-job Training
Over the past few years, the typical Product Manager comes from a Business Analyst position who then eventually steps up and becomes a Product Owner in a Scrum environment. The position is a great training ground for new grads primarily because it trains one in requirement gathering, exposes you to prioritisation, and makes you work on your stakeholder management skills - all hallmarks of a product manager. Other positions where Product Managers typically come from are design, engineering, support, and sales.
Career Shifting
Career Shifting
One of the best traits of a great product manager is ownership - which is why people with a strong entrepreneurial streak are often attracted to the role. As a multidisciplinary position, the role is friendly to career shifters. Professionals coming from Customer Support positions with deep understanding of the customer have great success in the role, although require a lot of work on catching up in a lot of engineering-related concepts.
Internal Necessity
Internal Necessity
A vast majority of Product Managers fell into the role while being in a different role altogether in their company. As startups mature and processes become even more complex, Product Management becomes a necessity for the company. Project Managers most of the time evolve into Product Managers or more enterprising Sales or Marketing professionals take more and more responsibilities in the space of management that they eventually assume the post by default.
Founding Companies
Founding Companies
Still, the easiest way to get into a Product Management career is to build the product yourself. CEOs are the first Product Manager of the company - their vision and strategy elating for the entire team to build and iterate the product. Great product managers exemplify also the same traits of a great founder - enterprising, visionary, with great project management skills. For recruiters, former CEOs or founders make for good Product hires. 
My Story in Product Management
Back in 2017, I shared my experience in how I got into Product Management. This deck narrates my background coming in, how I ended in Product, and what I learned eventually through it all.
Great Resources on How To Become a Product Managers

Common Paths for People who go into Product Management 

Product managers come from all manner of backgrounds, including:
Engineering, Research & Development
Quality or Operations Management
Technical Support
Marketing Communications
Customer Support
Sales Support
Additionally, some firms hire individuals directly from firms in the target market segment. There are many paths into this interesting and important role.

While product managers can advance their own functions or departments, it is common for experienced product managers to advance into general management or functional management roles. Most product managers are also promoted into sales, marketing, and other general management positions. Their broad-base of industry, offering, and operations knowledge make them highly desirable for a number of roles in an organization. 
Here are a few skills you might want to consider developing:
  • Collecting feedback from users, prioritizing it based on business impact and consumer impact, and sharing the information with relevant decision makers who can make changes happen
  • Coming up with a new idea for a feature and detailing out all the things it would do, then figuring out whether it can be built
  • Analyzing data from your website / app to determine common user paths or whether certain business events had a major impact
  • Managing revenue or profit and loss lines for a specific product or service and making changes that increase that revenue
  • Leading a project from start to finish that involves people from different teams coming together to build something
Online Courses Available about Product Managers

How Technical Should a Product Manager Be?

Product Managers have met success in their careers without writing one line of code. But no Product Manager can succeed without understanding basic concepts of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Agile Methodology. As a professional who needs to influence tech teams into working a certain way, you need to understand how they work and the different processes and concepts of their work.

Nonetheless, Product Managers coming from an engineering background have a distinct advantage on being able to get data they want faster and understanding the systems better than their non-tech counterparts. 

Here are the skills that we recommend product managers have.
Must have skills of Product Managers
A Quick Video on Prioritisation and Stakeholder Management as Essential Parts of Product Management
How to Build the Right Thing, A Case Study
In 2018, I presented a case study to Product PH members about my experience in building products and the failures and successes from it. The slides below goes over the different products I built and the reasons for their failure after doing a post-mortem.

How to Become a Better Product Manager

Conversational Style
Conversational Style 
Product managers are able to sell their products through a conversational style of organizing clients. They tell captivating stories focused around customer pain and their emotions, which motivate others to action.

While bad product managers are straight up salesmen - they are unable to lead with authority, so they try to persuade teams to implement ideas they come up with. The key is to establish yourself as a professional who wants to inspire, and not to sell.
Learning is Always the Key
Learning is Always the Key
Product managers are not only great leaders, but they are also efficient followers. Whether it’s customer interviews, shipping product or looking at user metrics, good product managers are always focused on what they can learn to improve their craft.

Undesirable product managers are focused on shipping as they believe that success is only defined by delivering product into the hands of their customers and earn profit. They never see how shipping is subset of learning. They fail to revisit what they ship and use what they’ve learned to iterate on the original idea.
Multipliers of Efficient Team Players
Multipliers of Efficient Team Players
For the most part, product managers are multipliers. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of their team and find ways to amend and utilise those skills. They learn the best way to work as an individual but at the same time, work with the team for productivity.

On the other hand, inefficient product managers are individual contributors. They have to be the first to have an opinion and sometimes prioritize their individual decision.
Context Over Ideas
Context Over Ideas
Product managers share context and is the curator of the best ideas. They invest in collective sharing of thoughts and opinions and know the best ideas will come from a team where everyone has shared objective ideas over the customer pain and the reason to care to solve them.

Never jump to a solution without team consultation as those bad traits will produce low-quality output that no one wants to sign up for.
Decision Making
Decision Making 
When it comes to decision making, product managers make a small percentage of team decisions. Their priority is to empower everyone on the team to make the best decision, especially on crucial situations.

Bad product managers make a large percentage of team decisions because they view themselves as the person who knows all the right choices. A good indicator of this is a team’s progress when their product manager is unavailable.
Make Everything as Simple as Possible
Make Everything as Simple as Possible
Product managers aims to inspire people to handle leadership without hesitating on the level of difficulty. If you ever see a product manager and think that you could do his/her job with the same success, then they’ve done their part as a team leader.

On the other hand, product managers who doesn’t prioritize team-building talk about their stressful lives, always run from meeting to meeting and never seem fully engaged in conversation. You’d never want to handle the job because of the stress that comes with it.
Knows How to Handle Bad Outcomes
Knows How to Handle Bad Outcomes
Product managers stay humble when they reach success. Winning in product development is a team sport, and there’s no “product” in team. They share the glory with others around them and make sure everyone is there to celebrate both big and small wins.

Product managers who can’t handle criticisms are the first to come up with an excuse and never want to talk about how they could improve for the next time around. They often point fingers at engineering, design, leadership…etc.
Great Relationship Builders
Great Relationship Builders
Good product managers are relationship-driven because they believe that relationships trump feature requests with external customers, and internal relationships drive great teams. They spend time knowing the people they work with on a personal level and think about the long term game, not the immediate future.

Bad product managers are heavily transactional. They tell others what they can do for them and ask for things in return. Everything is give and take.
Marketing Skills are Essential
Marketing Skills are Essential
Product managers are trained marketers. They know their target audience and know how to reach a wider audience and design their product for distribution.

Unprofessional product managers view product marketing as a secondary necessity that only the content team are suppose to handle.
Focused on Success
Focused on Success
Product managers are focused on having a successful output. They know when to push a team for a specific solution, and when to be creative on how to get there. They are persistent in pursuing clear customer pain and only focus on a select few to solve.

Unorganized product managers are all over the place. They run teams in a decision by committee basis. They want everyone to be happy and are willing to cater to every request.
Communities to Join in Product Management

In a lot of cases, the best help is from an active community that encounters the same issues that you do. The following are active communities that you can join, post questions, and form connections to people worldwide.

Top 5 Tools Used by Product Managers

ASANA

An online platform used to manage teams of any size. Using this tool enables each member to organize, plan, track and manage tasks assigned.


FIGMA

Team collaborative tool used for designing, prototype, wireframes, and sharing feedback.


HEAP

Product analytics software is used for monitoring, analyzing, and capturing your customer's behavior. This way, product marketing can be aligned with digital experience to enable customer retention.


LUCID CHART

Collaborative online platform ideal for visualization of processes. Utilized for making diagrams, charts, maps, and so much more


TYPEFORM

Interactive customer survey tool to get you to know your market helpful in product development and marketing.

Spotlight on 2021 Product Management Trends

Remote work will be the New Normal


2020 pandemic brought about drastic changes in how people work. With less contact and imposing distance, remote work is highly adapted. It will still be the case for 2021 to fight the COVID-19 pandemic is still in its beginning stage. Apart from the pandemic's reality, companies saw plenty of advantages with working remotely; fewer expenditures, less foot traffic, higher diversity and inclusion of workforce, and efficient recruitment of competitive talents.


Seamless Digital Experience will be in-demand more than ever


People spend a big chunk of their time online not only for entertainment, socialization but also on working remotely. With the rise of digital products, the demand for user-friendly, fast, and interactive platforms, tools, and interfaces will be high this 2021. Thus, the need for more creativity and adapting strategies in developing digital products that users demand and need.


Renewed Product Strategies


 2020 was a year business realize how unpredictable everything can be. With the higher closure and reported income loss of companies across many industries, adapting new strategies this 2021 and the coming years is on the rise. Instead of short-term goals, businesses are forced to think proactively and plan long-term to help them get by through situations like the pandemic. In a way, this is an excellent opportunity for Product managers to form innovations to let a business stand out and target customers.




Other Frequently Asked Questions about Product Management

List of Services

Reference/s:

Lei, M. (2018, February 26). So you want to be a product manager? This is how I got started. Medium - Freecodecamp.org. Retrieved from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-break-into-product-management-d354944308c0

Wright, V. (2018, December 18). What Education Do You Need to Be a Product Manager? Work - Chron.com. Retrieved from http://work.chron.com/education-need-product-manager-2487.html
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