Product Strategy
The product manager is responsible for setting a product vision and strategy. Their job is to clearly articulate the business value to the product team so they understand the intent behind the new product or product release. They own the strategy behind the product along with its roadmap and must work with development to define, prioritize and build what matters.
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Create and manage the product portfolio, roadmap, vision and backlog.
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Identify customer needs and market requirements.
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Evaluate competitive intelligence.
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Create business plans and proposals for new initiatives.
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Strategic partner and third party supplier management.
Product Releases
Product managers must plan for what their teams will deliver and when they will deliver it. The product manager owns the HW and SW release aspects of the product. Release responsibilities include managing HW and SW features and dependencies in and across releases, product and support teams; and managing releases with phases and milestones.
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Establish vision and goals for releases.
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Define market offer and structure.
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Work with enablement organizations to make products orderable and deliverable.
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Define and support implementation of training, support and deployment requirements.
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Manage risks and resolve issues that affect release scope, schedule and quality.
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Coordinate overall release project and schedule.
Product Visioning
Collecting, curating, and promoting the most relevant ideas into features. Defining which ideas should be promoted to features to achieve key objectives for the product line and business. Soliciting feedback and requests from partners, customers and field teams and ensuring this is seamlessly integrated into the product planning and development processes.
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Gather customer and sales feedback.
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Gather the voice of partner & customer input.
Feature Definition
The product manager defines the features and requirements necessary to deliver a complete product to market and lead the product team to success. They are responsible for articulating the ‘why’ and ‘what’, working with go to market to determine the ‘where’, and working with development to determine the ‘when’.
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Defining market-winning requirements.
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Direct and approve UI/UX activities.
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Define acceptance criteria, KPIs and SLAs.
Go-to-market Support
Responsible for making product decisions and often is the lead resource for the rest of the organization when deep product expertise is required. This includes supporting the organizations that help bring the product to market and work directly with customers including marketing, sales, training and support services.
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Facilitate sales and channel training.
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Assist pre-sales with custom project requests.
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Define and ensure implementation of GTM assets including demo environments, training materials, and presentations.
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Demonstrate new pre-release features.