What is Product Management.
The 3D of Product Management: Discovery, Delivery and Distribution
Some History…
The way I describe product management is the art and science of discovering, delivering, and distributing products. Now, let’s try to explain what product discovery, product delivery, and product distribution mean.
WTF is a Product
In essence, a product is any item that offers value to its recipient. Given our global economy, which operates on a value-exchange principle, a product can be defined as an item or service that offers value in return for another form of value, typically monetary. This value can manifest in numerous ways, be it an emotion, a problem resolution, facilitation of a task, or acting as a catalyst.
While products can take on tangible forms such as machines, smartphones, or even uniquely personal items like dildos, this discussion emphasizes software products. Why? Because, in the balance of effort versus impact, software stands out. It requires comparatively minimal effort but has the potential for widespread and significant impact.
Software products are simply lines of code that offer value to customers so that they can pay the makers of the software. Now, let’s look at what product discovery is and why we should care about it.
Product Discovery
Product discovery is the field of understanding what product to build so that a laid down goal is achieved. Let’s backtrack a bit and talk about the software makers, these people want to make money by offering value, so they have goals to achieve to continue making software. Case in point, Spotify needed to achieve a goal of acquiring x amount of users so that they could expand to Africa and enable us to stream Afro-beats for free.
Discovery answers the questions of what should we be building to achieve our goals consistently. The solution must be feasible, usable, viable, and valuable.
The discovery process helps us understand what exactly we must build to achieve the goal; it starts from understanding who to focus on, what problems to solve and not solve for, and some other hard decisions to get to the point where every stakeholder is clear on what exactly to build, it is compulsory, however, to note that what must be built is feasible and usable as well.
Product Delivery
Product delivery ensures that the solution proposed to solve a problem is built right, built with the core values and principles of the team, and has some soul in it.
Delivery is the process of building and launching the output that will deliver the outcome obtained from the discovery process.
It involves creating project deliverables and timelines and testing to ensure that the product actually solves the identified customer’s problem. This is where the methodology for the software development lifecycle comes in: the Agile or waterfall, the sprints, JIRA tickets, motivating teammates, and all of that. All of these are means to the output: the solution. This solution is a means to the outcome mentioned earlier in the discovery process.
Product Distribution
This concept was made popular by the famous Airbnb CEO’s talk, mentioning that product management has evolved in the company and product managers need to understand how products will be marketed to the intending customers and the function should answer the questions:
How do they hear about the product?
How do we get them to try the products?
How do we get them to pay for the product?
Depending on the product, it could be a sales or a marketing role, it is also important to make sure that the product is being measured and analysed to inform the management process.
Sales or marketing depends on the business. The aim is to get the product to the user for validation
Conclusion
Product management is any activity that ensures a product team is building the right thing and building it right. It is a never-ending cycle of discovering what to build, building it, selling it, and measuring the impact of the build to inform the next discovery…and the cycle goes on and on.