Product Manager: building blocks

Unlike marriages (as many say), product manager evolve from experience. So here are some running thoughts on what constitute a good product manager or what really helps in building a strong character of a product manager.

Product Manage: Building blocks

Level 1: Fundamentals:

1. Project intrinsic: Aspects of project management like development process, project RAID, critical path, resource optimal utilization, release milestones etc. These are important to judge the feasibility of timelines and deliverable.
2. Stamina: ability to put in long hours and does not constraint to 9 to 6 / business hours. For a product manager there is no stat or finish line, life moves in circles with new milestones in each lap. Another way of stating this is leading by example on how hard (detailing) a individual can work and how much could he/ she deliver.
3. Articulation: One of the most desired aspect or quality that is expected in a product manager is the ability to express oneself easily in clear and effective language. This is aspect that has maximum influences on effectiveness of a product manager. Remember effectiveness of a team directly depends upon the effectiveness of the product manager. Also, good articulation requires good observation skills and this is what helps in drafting clear and elaborated requirements.
4. People management: Critical and most challenging aspect of product management. A product manager must learn to get the work out of a team that does not report into him. Influence  or use authority or may be by showing some carrot, whatever it takes get the work done.

Evolution and Future of Product Management

We humans are interesting and so are our dreams. On one hand we aim for perfection - try to match precision of machine and on other hand we with help of Artificial Intelligence, design machines to match humans. Evolution and Future of Product Management is inspired by this philosophy of humans & machines.

In ancient world construction was considered as an Art, which later on was discovered as science and now a technology (for eg. Building Technology, drawing cartoons). This is something what I refer here as stages of evolution. A human skill that start as Art and on application of logic becomes science and with help of Technic and simulations soon becomes a technology.

Rich Mironov wrote 'Art of Product Management' and I could search enough paper and course on product management on web which makes it more logical role than ever. From my understanding, Product Management activities are now more logical and conclusive than what it was 10 years back when I was first introduced to the concept of Product Management. Product Management today has done successful transformation from Art to Science and has certainly evolved and matured a lot. Use of Agile methodology and tools is just one more example to get convinced on this point of evolution.

The next phase of evolution will be Product Management Technology wherein we would have thousands of tools and Technic to simulate and judge outcome of a specific product management function, not much different from simulations used in large engineering projects today. This is where we will believe how difficult life would have been for Product Managers in late 90s and early 2000s. Exactly the way we try and appreciate life style of any ancient civilization today. The simulation tools of product management will be so powerful that using demographic, technology and market data, VP Product Management will be able to craft out hundreds of products with millions of features with ROI calculation within few minutes. Simulation tool will also be used to prioritize features, bug scrubs, competitive analysis, managing backlogs and many other tasks that Product Managers spend large time today.

So what next after that? - maturity will grow further and just like it happened with machines, Product Management tools will be injected by Artificial Intelligence. With advent of A.I. in crucial business role, large corporate houses will define and device their next generation product / service with accurate features and user experience in no time, success of which will exceed far beyond any product story we know today.

But will all these help exceeding customer expectation and beat competition? I doubt, because customer too get mature and so does their understanding, expectation and demand. So will be the case with competition who tool would be using similar simulations tools. Struggle to beat customer expectation continues through all these four stages of evolution cycle. It is always wise for a product manager to get convinced that their is lot more to do to meet customer expectation and beat competition, forget exceeding expectation.

Demanding customers and catching competition will call for further innovations and improvements in A.I. Technic, at this nirvana stage, researchers will give inject near perfect human touch to A.I. Technic and A.I. in Product Management will get flavor of Art (maybe with help of Rich Mironov's 'Art of Product Management').  Evolution that started with Art, and traversed through various phases of Science, Technology and A.I. will attain nirvana on reaching back to Art but this time will be A.I. Art.