A Software Product Manager is a market-obsessed person focused on delivering the most valuable version of a specific product that will maximize business objectives for an enterprise at every stage of product development.
The person in this role has a great deal of ownership and fulfills many roles from the intersection of business, user experience, and technology. As such, a Software Product Manager must have the ability to remain agile, which is why we adhere to Agile methodology.
Agile methodology can be described as one of the simplest and most effective processes to turn a vision for a business need into real, working software — it involves continuous planning, learning, improvement, cross-functional self-organizing team collaboration, and iterative development and delivery.
Software Product Management is a bridge between sales, marketing, and customer support driven by empathy. A Software Project Manager helps to
- Achieve business objectives
- Bridges communication gaps
- Aligns a common vision with the tech team
- Focuses on user needs
- Represents the user inside a company
Why research is vital for your product?
In-depth research is core for a Product Manager. Being a voice for the market requires tremendous and up-to-date market knowledge, followed by tracing and identifying market trends and significant economic changes.
User research provides in-depth insights that ease the decision-making process. An important source of information also comes through a competitive analysis. Data-driven qualitative and quantitative research helps you make the right decisions.
Why is validation a business life-saver?
An idea that is not verified is just a hypothesis. A key Product Manager responsibility is to ask thought-provoking questions and to cultivate answers. Before launching a product or a new feature, a Product Manager must validate an existing problem and a given solution for specific target groups. Customer feedback enables a product to grow in the right direction or pivot when necessary.
There are many experiments and approaches to validate your assumptions. However, having experiments designed incorrectly leads to false and damaging results. A Product Manager is capable of running low-fidelity experiments requiring smaller investment and fewer assets as well as more complex, high-fidelity experiments, adequate to product needs. Credible validation reduces the risk of a product or feature failure and raises the chance of your product succeeding.
What are the key aims of product management?
Product management is an organizational function within a business that deals with product development and justification. It focuses on bringing a new and effective product to market or developing an existing product. Product management examples include:
- Building
- Measuring
- Improving
As a whole, a product management strategy should look to identify and reflect the value the product does or will bring to its users.
Essentially, the key aim of product management is to find answers to fundamental product questions: What user problem does our product solve? How does it achieve that better than the competition?
The product management process is about finding the right audience for your idea and identifying the key features that will help you cut through to the audience. It’s a key step in validating your business idea to increase your chances of success.
Why communication is key in product management?
Dealing with dozens of internal and external stakeholders requires being a great speaker and aligning a common vision within an organization. Communication skills, great storytelling and public speaking skills, and high emotional intelligence play a key role in the everyday life of a Product Manager.
A universal tool to maintain transparency and clarity within an organization is a product roadmap, representing an understandable, high-level concept of the product. A Product Manager ensures every person in the organization is aligned with a common goal.
How is product management applied in different industries?
Businesses in all industries can benefit from product management services. Every business, for example, performs some sort of service or sells some sort of product that needs a specific approach and requires certain knowledge. Finance is one example.
In a fintech or banking product, it is required to cope with legal affairs and security. The same applies in retail, for example in the development of food and grocery delivery apps, where UX and internal processes play key roles.
Netguru specializes in product management for a range of diverse industries, from the legal example we shared above to working with family banking companies, and much more.
Why hire Netguru for Product Management Consulting?
By working with Netguru throughout the entire product lifecycle, you have a trusted partner who’s there to help you build well-researched and effective software. We offer end-to-end product development consulting services, meaning our skilled team is here throughout the product development process, from validating your ideas and devising a product management strategy to doing all we can to ensure your product launch is successful.
Our product leaders and squads are on hand to identify market gaps, research user needs, and make sure you reach a product-market fit. They’re also responsible for building product roadmaps and ensuring the process runs smoothly, whether you’re building a product from scratch or updating an existing one.
