What Is Product Management?

Modern product management

In simple terms, product management is the craft of managing product development through what’s known as the product lifecycle. It ensures that companies identify customer needs and provide value through the products they build. It links deciding what to make with the act of creating it and producing value through that creation.

Product management involves:

• Understanding the product’s purpose

• Researching potential customers

• Designing features

• Setting product goals

• Creating product roadmaps

• Launching the product

• Measuring the product's success

By leveraging product management principles and practices, businesses can create successful products faster than ever before. This helps them make well-informed decisions about how to design a product with their target audience in mind, while ensuring they stay competitive in the market. Said another way, product management accelerates business by identifying the right things to work on for the right audience. By keeping up-to-date on current trends in technology, customer behavior, rapid product prototyping, and assumption validation, product managers can adjust product plans to the best effect. In the world of software, where product management is a de facto practice, this puts it squarely in the intersection between the customer experience, technology and those building it, and the needs of the business.