What does a product manager do?

In this video, product managers explain what they do in their day-to-day work.

Product managers:

• represent users and their needs
• form and iterate the product vision
• plan and prioritise product iterations
• manage expectations with their teams, colleagues and stakeholders

Product managers also need to understand the context of the product they are working on and how it relates to other products in the organisation and beyond.

Agile product management

You may or may not already be familiar with agile methods.

Throughout this course, we will use certain words and phrases relating to agile, such as iterate, sprint, or lean. It will be helpful for those of you unfamiliar with agile to get a brief introduction here.

Agile is a flexible and adaptable methodology that involves breaking the project down into manageable phases, focusing on continuous improvement. It is an iterative approach to delivering a product throughout its life cycle. Agile life cycles are composed of several iterations (incremental steps) towards achieving the product outcome.

The 5 stages of the product life cycle

Discovery

Discovery is the process of researching your users and their needs, validating a problem based on your research and beginning to think about how your product or service can solve it.

Alpha

In alpha, we create and test different prototypes and ideas with users. We should not be afraid to fail or to discard ideas that aren’t working. Alpha is about experimenting to be sure we’ve arrived at the right solution.

Beta

In beta, we take the best ideas and insights from the alpha stage and build your product or service for real, preparing to launch it to real users. This occurs in “private beta” to a limited audience first and then in “public beta” after you are confident you can run the service at scale. It is important to analyse user feedback and data to see how your product is working.

Live

During live, we support the service in a sustainable way while still iterating and making improvements where necessary. We continue to work closely with users to ensure the product or service is fulfilling a real user need and achieving its outcome.

Retirement

We retire a product or service if it is obsolete or no longer addresses a user need. We share experience and user insights with teams working on replacement services to help users transition to that replacement with minimal disruption.

Agile working

Agile focuses on people rather than processes, incorporating user feedback into each iteration, with each life cycle stage containing multiple iterations.

A team using an agile method such as Scrum or Kanban will work in short, focused periods called sprints. During sprints, the team will research, plan, build and test their product all at the same time.

This approach allows the team to respond quickly to changing priorities. For example, a team needs to be able to adapt to a change in government policy to avoid wasting time and resources on a product or service that is no longer fit for purpose.

If you would like to know more, you can read about agile in government here.

Product managers in government

In government, product managers tend to work as part of multidisciplinary product or service teams. We will learn about the rest of the team in step 1.8.

Product managers working as part of a product or service team:

• represent the needs of their users, and balance these needs with the needs of the business and technology
• make sure the service fits in with the organisation’s priorities and achieves the right outcomes
• make sure the problem is fully understood, so we’re developing the right thing
• define what the future goal of the product or service is (often called the ‘product vision’, which we will discuss this week)
• make sure the service meets user needs
• make sure the service is accessible to everyone, including people who have a disability
• prioritise user stories for each work sprint (we will discuss user stories in Week 2)
• decide when the acceptance criteria of the user stories have been fulfilled
• evaluate technical, content and design solutions

Task

Which area of a product manager’s role is the most important to you in the context of your work and why? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.