What is product management?

Product management is role in some company or industry that the job is to create new product or improve existing product. usually product management nowdays is more focus in the tech industry which the person who handle product management called Product Manager. in this role, they in charge regarding overall success of the product they handle

What Product They Handle?

This is good questions, people often think that product manager is someone who manage all of the product, previously when i work in one of hotel industry, my friends always think that i manage the hotel, because they think is the Hotel is the product.

Indeed that we can think hotel is a product, but in product management product can be multiple think for example, when the customer want to book hotel and they use our Application that they can download in Play Store or App Store, we can think that apps is an Product.

In those apps there will be a lot of feature for example list of Facility that the hotel have, that can be called as product.

Or when the finance team want to pull regarding financial data from the internal system, the internal system also can be called product.

Misconception About Product Management

A lot of people who works with product manager think that product manager just a feature guy, or someone who think what is the next feature that needs to be developed, this is something that not entirely wrong, because one of our role is to make sure the product is to make it successful, but in the way to make it successful we need to develop. but in the other side as Product Manager we don’t always think to creating something but we should think about the COST.

Cost? Why should i think Cost as Product Mangement?

Should cost is managed by the finance guy or someone from business team? Well not like that, cost that we think is not always money, but any resource that the company have for example:

1. Money, we always think that money is the only cost that we should think, it is true for some company who still in seed or pre-seed round that have limited budget, so as PM we need to think if we need to purchase or rent new tools we should get the most efficient tools in terms of usability and cost.
2. Time, often time we always never think time as an cost, because we always have time, and we think time is something that cheap, time is important cost in product management, because sometime if we too focus on the complex stuff or solution we wasting developer time, business, designer, and our own time also.
3. Bandwidth or Human Resource, this is pretty much related with the Time one, because often in the company people tell about “We don’t have Bandwidth for this feature” which is translated to “We don’t have time to develop this feature” means they are occupied for other things that more important.
4. Opportunity Cost, this is something that often very hard to think or see even as PM who already senior in the company especially if the company is already quite mature and already get the product market fit. usually opportunity cost will more easily spotted when the company still small and the product market fit is still not achieved yet, in this scenario due to limited amount of resource (money, time, etc) they should think carefully where they need to allocate the resource to which project they need to focus, because when they do something with some project it means, they burning the resource on that project, and they can’t allocate some of resource to other project or they can do the other project at all.

Conclusion

Product management is a role in a company that involves creating or improving products, with a focus on the tech industry. Product managers are responsible for the overall success of the product they handle, which can include apps, features, and internal systems. While the role involves developing new features, product managers also need to consider costs, which can include money, time, bandwidth, and opportunity costs.