2 ms·
I'm a Product Manager inside a software company, which means I work with an internal development group to actually execute my ideas (certainly some POs/PMs work
by zzalpha 10y ago
I'm a Product Manager inside a software company, which means I work with an internal development group to actually execute my ideas (certainly some POs/PMs work with outsourced staff, but that's not the case here, with the exception of one product where the outsourced staff are largely treated as direct team members, so the dynamic is largely the same as with our internal staff).
That means my job turns into talking to customers, collecting requirements and authoring user stories, prioritizing the backlog, and generally giving the developers all the information and guidance they need to build (what I hope is) the best product we can, with the right feature set, executed with the right timing.
Of course, I still enjoy coding, but what I enjoy about coding isn't the hammering of the nails, but rather building a finished product from which users gain benefit. In that respect, what I'm doing now is leveraging an entire staff of people to achieve a vision I couldn't possible deliver by myself, which is pretty damn cool!
The role itself is multi-disciplinary. I have to understand the technology in order to adequately gauge cost and complexity, technical tradeoffs, and so forth. But I also have to understand the business impact of those decisions, and the way those decisions affect the customer.
In my particular case, we're in a B2B environment where we do deep technical integrations as part of product deployment. So my customers are individual business owners and technical operations staff that I interact with directly on a very regular basis (as opposed to, say, a consumer product where you're dealing in aggregate customer behaviour).