The Desk: What One VP of Product Management Keeps On Her Desk to Stay Inspired

From playlists to french presses, find out what the VP of product management at Applied Systems needs to lead. Janey Zitomer. February 5, 2021. Janey … Read source

At the most basic level, a VP of Product Management is the person responsible for driving a product’s success. A good Product Manager can help an organization move forward faster, execute more efficiently, and improve overall results.

But what does that actually mean?

A product is more than just a collection of features or specs. It’s also many things that come together to create an overall experience for your customers. That can include customer support, marketing, sales, and more. The ultimate goal of any product manager is to build products that customers love and want to use, which can generate more sales.

That doesn’t just happen on its own, though, which is why product managers do so much more than just write specs. You’re not just coming up with ideas for future products. On a day-to-day basis, you’re looking at how your company measures up against competition, how your features stack up against your biggest competitors, and what you can do to improve your product or create new products.

You’re working one-on-one with customers to understand what they really need from new features and updates, and how those new features will affect their overall experience as users of your product.

You’re asking your team questions like: are we releasing too many updates too quickly, or too few? Are we introducing too many bugs with these updates, or not enough? What’s the effect on the user experience? Is it really better? Do people like it?

And then you come up with solutions — strategies to move forward faster, make better products, and grow your sales. You might involve engineers, designers, product managers, executives and decision makers in your experiments and strategy sessions. Based on the feedback you receive, you could alter your plans on a dime based on what you learned.

It’s a role that requires you to keep an eye on what’s happening in your industry and respond fast by making changes to your product or strategy. Doing so can mean you build a product that people love — that they use every day and want to share with the world.

The best product managers are always looking for ways to improve their product, which keeps them ahead of competitors. Through their efforts, they’re able to grow their business by making the right decisions about the future and often by catering to new audiences. That’s a big part of what makes a great Product Manager — knowing what needs to be improved and why.

To learn more about the duties of a Product Manager, check out this article on Medium: http://bit.ly/1o7mQ4v .

When you get right down to it, the responsibilities typically fall into four main areas:

Defining the feature set and specifications

Researching what your customers want

Building and testing the product

Leading the product team