What a Product Manager can bring to your software based startup?
Involving a Product Manager — accelerate your company growth by making smarter choices!
You are running your startup and are wondering if you should get a Product Manager, and what to expect from them? Let go through what a Product Manager can bring to your startup.
Product Management is an old practice in corporations. While initially oriented on marketing and branding aspects, we are now seeing this expertise following the expansion of software edition. Product Managers are involved in more and more projects.
Benefit #1: You will know your context
Product Managers need and want to know in which context they are evolving. They will craft a vision of your competitors: what features they have, what are their pricing plan, what is their level of quality… You will be able to get a sense of how your product is positioned compared to the others on the market, from a user standpoint.
At the same time, you will create a deep understanding of your users. Product Managers are working on user studies: they want to be sure to understand what users are expecting. Features, UX, pricing… Product Managers will want to have this information and will search for it.
Benefit #2: Create a plan
The first benefit is mainly a lot of information. Product Managers are gathering this knowledge, but this is just the beginning. The real value of Product Managers is when they are creating a plan based on this data.
Knowing all this information, you will have to prioritize and chose what to do first. Product Managers are used to make these decisions and will be there to provide you a plan. They will craft a roadmap, prioritizing features and actions to maximize the value you are delivering.
You want it said more simply?
Product Managers will ensure you will be creating the minimum to be successful on your market.
Follow a good Product Manager, and you will only create features that your customers actually need and use.
Benefit #3: React
Product Managers are obsessed with measuring. They want to follow how the product is used, to measure how the users are happy with it, and how successful it is on the business side.
Once again, this is not just for the sake of creating a report. Product Managers will always adapt their plan to react to the measurements. If a hypothesis is proved wrong, they will take action as fast as they can to improve the situation.
Benefit #4: Communicate the plans
Product Managers have one very important soft skill: communication. Being part of a lot of discussions, they need to communicate very clearly. They are used to deal with various expertise, and so to adapt their speech to be fully understood.
Your Product Manager can help you communicate your plan clearly and simply, to a lot of different profiles. You should work with the Product Managers to reduce the gap between different teams by using their skills.
Benefit #5: Align on the direction
Communicating the plan is one thing. Being sure that everyone agrees and follows it is another one. Product Managers are the masters of the “Why?”. As they measure, create a plan, measure again and then react, they always have a strong idea of Why the product is being built this way.
Product Managers are working hard to ensure that every team understand the plan and are comfortable following it. And if there is one team not happy with it, well… read the Benefit #3 again :)
Want to know more about Product Management? Not sure yet? Just want to have a chat? Feel free to reach me :)
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