A CASUAL INTRODUCTION TO

PRODUCT MANAGEMENTor,

All of the responsibility & none of the power…

Imperial College / May 2016

Randy Silver

A bit about me.

http://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/well-i-was-born-at-a-very-young-age-and-me-too-70601

bbc.co.uk

https://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5387961900

Where do we fit?

The essential quality of Product Managers

http://statement.sg/products/plays-well-with-others

Martin Eriksson / Mind the Product

We have 2 jobs…

http://metro.co.uk/2015/06/11/dinosaur-supervisor-demoted-after-letting-everyone-get-killed-in-jurassic-park-5241260/

• Figure out what to do

• Convince people to do it

What does a Product Manager actually do, anyway?

Feature Development

Putting out fires

Organisational process & analysis

Competitor research

Stakeholder & Customer management

User research

The dirty secret: for the

most part, we’re middle management

Staring into space

Prioritisation, Backlog & Roadmap

Essential skills

• Technical• Coding• Hosting & Delivery• Infrastructure• Mobile

• Marketing & Sales• SEO/SEM

• Business Management• Governance• Budgeting• Vendor Management• Stakeholder Management

• User Experience• Testing• Interviewing• Design

• Content Development, Management & Publishing

• Support• Data, Analytics & Reporting

Essential skills

(really)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/55/c3/d6/55c3d6e553a7b53bd45cd849c3b9c16e.jpg

(possibly. obligatory

Einstein quote of dubious

provenance.

CEO of the product?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Customer-Fire-Everybody-Company/dp/B00MY1LQZQ/

Product vs Project Managers

“A Project Manager is like a midwife - he/she delivers the baby, hands it over to the mother and moves on.

The baby being the product and the mother being the Product Manager.”

-Derek MorrisonHead of Product, PracticeTesco

Portfolio management

https://www.flickr.com/photos/miajudkins/4124218980

Portfolio management

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/evildead/images/b/b1/Ash.png/revision/latest?cb=20140719001020

Product Managers and Product Leaders

Product leaders create the conditions for product managers to succeed.

We need to build strong relationships with Engineering and Marketing/Sales; craft sensibly lightweight processes; and help cut through the inevitable company politics.

We need to push our product managers to take strong action and defend them when they do. We need to keep executives focused on markets, value and problems to be solved.

-Rich Mironov

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-do-product-leaders-worry-rich-mironov?

A short aside about lean, scrum, agile, kanban or any other idealised process or philosophy.

Your company will never love you.

*unless you own it

https://xkcd.com/317/

Resources & Development

• Product Tank / Mind the Product• Blog, meetup, Slack group &

conference• Meetups• London Product Talks, London

Product Group, many more• Podcasts: • A16Z, This is Product

Management, Ready Product Radio, Product Hunt, UIE Brain Sparks

• General Assembly• Silicon Valley Product Group• Product Manager HQ• Many, many articles on Medium • Rich Mironov, Ken Norton, Melissa

Perri, Jeff Gothelf, Jared Spool and many many more

randy.silver@gmail.com@randy_silver