我去年写的总结-谈谈对产品经理的认识A Summary I Wrote Last Year: My Understanding of Product Managers

A Summary I Wrote Last Year: My Understanding of Product Managers

After reading Zhou Hongyi’s articles on product managers, products, and user experience (“Carrying a Product Like Carrying a Child: Five User Experience Points That Demand Special Attention,” among others), I was quite inspired, yet at the same time felt they left something unsaid. What is a product manager? What are a product manager’s responsibilities? What abilities and qualities should a real product manager possess? I looked up some material online (on Zhihu), combined it with my own experience at work, and tried to answer these questions.

So what exactly is a product manager? What are the main responsibilities of this position? Across different corners of the IT industry, and even at different companies within the same field, the definition of this role seems to vary. Although the product manager’s role and duties differ from company to company, there are certain key responsibilities that every product manager should shoulder. They can be summed up in the following six areas:

1. Market Research

Market research means studying the market to understand customer needs, the competitive landscape, and market forces; its ultimate goal is to uncover potential opportunities to innovate or improve the product.

Market research can be carried out in the following ways:

• Talking with users and potential users

• Talking with frontline colleagues who face customers directly, such as sales, customer service, and technical support

• Studying market analysis reports and articles

• Trying out competing products

• Closely observing user behavior, and so on

• Market research ultimately takes shape as a business opportunity, a product strategy, or a business requirements document (BRD), detailing how to seize the potential opportunity.

Personal takeaway (found on Zhihu):

The most critical point here is how to find real needs (hard needs) and avoid falling into the trap of weak or false ones. How? 1. Treat yourself as a novice user, stand in the user’s shoes, and forget your own experience and technical knowledge. 2. Learn to ask questions: Where does the need come from? Who is the target customer? How many people have this need? Is it urgent? What are their pain points? What is the scenario (before/after using the product)? Once the need is met, how will it show up in the data and metrics?

2. Product Definition and Design

a) Product definition means determining what the product needs to do. It is usually described in a product requirements document (PRD), which may contain the following information:

• The product vision

• Target market

• Competitive analysis

• Detailed descriptions of product features

• Feature priorities

• Product use cases (UseCase)

• System requirements

• Performance requirements

• Sales and support requirements, and so on

b) Product design means determining what the product looks like, including user interface design (UI, User Interface) and user interaction design (User Interaction), covering everything that makes up the user experience. At large companies, product managers usually complete product design together with UI designers or interaction designers, but at small companies or startups, the product manager may need to take on all of this work alone.

This is the most valuable part of a product manager’s work. If a job does not include this part, you can say with near certainty that it is not a product manager’s job.

Personal takeaway: the product requirements document is written mainly for colleagues in engineering, so write it with that audience in mind. Describe things, as far as possible, in language engineers can understand. What counts as language engineers can understand? I call it MVC-pattern language.

M is the Model: spell out what data and information domains a feature involves, as clearly and precisely as you can. C is Control: describe the flow of a feature or a business process clearly, what step one is, what step two is, and which roles each step involves. V is the View: when necessary, describe the interface the requirement calls for, what the screen for this feature looks like, and make it clear in the form of drawings.

The granularity of requirement descriptions calls for a trade-off: not too coarse, or engineers won’t understand; not too fine either, or you risk boxing in their thinking.

3. Project Management

Project management means leading people from different teams (including engineers, QA, UI designers, marketing, sales, customer service, and so on) to develop and release the product on time and within budget. This may include the following work:

• Securing resource commitments

• Drawing up the project plan

• Tracking progress against the plan

• Identifying the critical path

• Fighting for additional investment when necessary

• Reporting project status to supervising leaders, and so on

• At large companies there is usually a project manager to handle most project management work, and the product manager only needs to provide support. At startups, however, the product manager usually has to do the project management personally. At some companies, the technical lead may also act as project manager and handle most project management matters.

Personal takeaway (found on Zhihu): as a product manager, your decisions and your actions on a project all serve one purpose, getting the project done on time and in full, better and faster. A few points on team management:

1. Get to know, as deeply as you can, the specialized knowledge of upstream and downstream roles,

2. Give team members enough information and enough room.

3. Communicate and learn boldly; never be ashamed to ask.

4. Handle requirement changes with care.

5. Praise and compliment colleagues often.

6. Dare to take responsibility.

How does a product manager make their views persuasive, so that technical people feel you are talking sense and are willing to do as you say? To persuade others, especially colleagues in engineering, design, and frontend, the most important thing is not eloquence, communication skills, or data, but professionalism. Professionalism means: first, you think, communicate, and execute with an insider’s ways of thinking, expressing, and handling things; second, you can regularly make the right calls. A person has to believe first that you are capable of saying the right things before they will listen carefully to what you say, and only then might they come to accept it. People generally assume that only insiders can say the right things, while outsiders can only give blind orders. So a product manager must come across as an insider, as a professional, at every moment. Some product managers agonize: what I said was clearly right, so why won’t the engineers listen? Yes, you may well be right, but your everyday performance has convinced the engineers you are an amateur, and they never seriously listened to what you were saying in the first place. Only by learning the specialized knowledge of upstream and downstream roles as broadly and deeply as possible, backed by a certain amount of hands-on experience, can we appear professional; then, in communicating with those roles, we earn their trust, and in turn they adopt our opinions. There are a few small tricks worth sharing, but before reading them, this must be restated: the fundamental way to become professional is to learn as much as you can about each role’s specialized knowledge. Tricks are only a device; do not fantasize that tricks alone will ever make you truly professional.

Trick 1: Use the jargon whenever you can.

Trick 2: Think rigorously; before you speak, try to work through every possible scenario and its solution.

Trick 3: Let the other person reach the conclusion themselves.

Trick 4: Tailor the dish to the diner. You do not persuade everyone with the same words; people differ. You treat engineers, designers, and the boss differently.

Trick 5: Personal charm. Have a sense of humor; learn to lighten the mood. There is no need to wear a stern face and lecture people at every requirements discussion. Crack a joke, clown around a little, pour the designer a glass of water, knead the engineer’s shoulders, hand the girls in operations a few pieces of chocolate, buy the ops colleagues a few bottles of water. Build up goodwill like this day to day, and when you need something, people naturally won’t make things hard for you. What can be done gets done; what can’t be done gets done anyway, with one eye closed.

All tricks are merely devices; real ability and real work are what reign supreme.

4. Product Evangelism

This mainly involves communicating the product’s strengths, features, and target market to internal colleagues such as the boss, sales, marketing, and customer service; it may also involve presenting the product to the outside world, such as the media, industry analysts, and users.

Product managers at big companies usually have product marketing, promotion, and media relations (PR) teams to help with external product evangelism.

After product definition and design, this is the second most valuable part of a product manager’s work, especially when you present the product to the boss and to marketing colleagues and get them genuinely excited.

5. Product Marketing

This is mainly outward communication: telling the outside world about the product. It usually includes producing product data sheets, brochures, websites, Flash demos, media features, and trade show demonstrations.

At large companies, product marketing is usually not the product manager’s responsibility; these companies have dedicated product marketing managers to handle it. Of course, the biggest drawback of this division of labor is lower communication efficiency, and it weakens outward messaging.

At some companies, “product management” and “product marketing” are treated as synonyms, with one person carrying both sets of duties. At companies that separate the product management team from the product marketing team, the latter handles the duties described in this section, and they may also take on part of the work of market research, product evangelism, and product life cycle management.

6. Product Life Cycle Management

This refers to the product management activities that accompany the product through its entire life cycle: conception -> launch -> maturity -> withdrawal from the market.

The main work includes:

• Product positioning

• Product pricing and promotions

• Product line management

• Competitive strategy

• Building or acquiring partners

• Identifying and establishing partnerships, and so on

• The product manager completes this work together with colleagues in product marketing, BD, and marketing communications.

How do you become a qualified product manager? What qualities does a product manager need? A product manager needs three core sets of qualities: personal qualities, knowledge management qualities, and core competency qualities.

Personal qualities:

Product management is a rather particular line of work. As a result, every company that has adopted a product management system, without exception, holds the specific “person” of the product manager to stricter requirements of quality and character than any other position. Specifically, there are five areas:

Personal cultivation

Capacity for innovation

Communication and coordination skills

Self-management skills

Ability to withstand work pressure

These are the basic qualities a product manager should possess. Without them, however strong your other abilities, they will hold you back from becoming an excellent product manager. Among these five, some are familiar to everyone, such as communication skills and the ability to withstand pressure. Here I want to focus on the aspects that tend to be overlooked.

Personal cultivation

The quality of one’s personal cultivation shows how mature a person is. Its highest expression, in the words of the old saying, is to be “unmoved by favor or disgrace.” The product manager’s work has two characteristics:

1. Authority and responsibility are mismatched;

2. You depend on the team at every moment.

This seemingly self-contradictory position means a product manager simply must have very good personal cultivation. Say the engineering team, for whatever reason, brushes off or drags its feet on a request you raised. What do you do? Interrogate them, file a complaint, or get angry? I believe that in such a situation, if you were not the product manager, any of those reactions would be perfectly normal. But as the product manager, reacting that way does your work no good and instead erodes your authority and standing within the product team. The recommended approach is to “stand on the larger interests of the product project, explain with objective data, and point out the consequences of the foot-dragging,” letting the other side judge what they should do rather than you telling them what to do. That way, they feel that you and they are one body, one team, that you trust whatever decision they make, that you respect them. So in product management work, the very core of personal cultivation is to “respect every person on the team, trust every person on the team.”

A sense of innovation

The strength of a company’s capacity for innovation determines how long it can endure in competition.

Nowadays both the state and companies talk about innovation, yet in reality no one has ever named a group to lead it. Within a company, the group that leads innovation can be none other than the product managers.

Two factors determine this.

1. The market environment: competition in today’s market is in essence a competition of a company’s overall resources. But a company’s limited resources dictate that it must produce products in a “market-oriented” way. From this angle, product innovation is in essence the creative satisfaction of user needs.

And this process of satisfying needs is, without question, led by the product manager.

2. The definition of the role: the fundamental purpose of a product manager’s work, to put it bluntly, is “to keep the company profitable over the long run,” and all the work unfolds from there. What does lasting profit rest on? On satisfying user needs to the greatest degree. And within the company, who understands user needs best? Only the product manager.

So a company’s growth rests on innovation, innovation is led by product managers, the direction of innovation must not stray from market demand, and the company’s growth must depend on product innovation: each reinforces the other. As the bridge between company and customer, the product manager’s importance goes without saying.

Communication skills

Communication divides into verbal communication and written communication.

Omitted.

Resilience under pressure

Omitted.

Self-management

It has to be admitted that a product manager’s work is excessively tedious and varied; plenty of matters that have nothing to do with your own job will come along to disrupt your normal work. At times like these, your level of self-management directly affects how effective you are. In other words, it is a question of whether a product manager can withstand influences of every kind in daily work without drifting off course.

Fulfilling a plan comes down to holding the direction and persevering; the level of one’s personal ability is not actually decisive. A product manager’s daily work is really “one plan after another”: drafting, executing, verifying, correcting, and drafting the next one. And in this day-after-day work, influences of every kind lurk everywhere. As a product manager, can you guarantee that every day you know “what to say, what to do, and how to do it”?

That is self-management. Put simply, it asks the product manager to “think what should be thought, say what should be said, and do what should be done.”

Knowledge management qualities

As the market environment changes, product management is gradually becoming a new management discipline. In the course of taking shape, it has absorbed many valuable ideas from other disciplines. For product managers, this means that professionally, beyond product management skills proper, you also have to learn management knowledge from many neighboring disciplines.

Today’s product manager has thus been given new meaning; more and more companies have begun to expect product managers to shoulder bigger and broader responsibilities. That expectation demands well-rounded management knowledge; otherwise, the “little CEO without power” will never become a “real CEO.”

The management knowledge a product manager needs should center on:

Strategic management

Project management

Time management

Team management

These four areas of management knowledge are intimately relevant to every product manager. Perhaps they do not directly affect the concrete work, but they affect it through their influence on product management skills; whether you possess these four kinds of knowledge will therefore indirectly affect how you do your job.

Strategic management

Many product managers may know what they will be doing within the year. But ask them, “Do you know what you’ll be doing over the next three to five years?” and I suspect nearly every one will shake their head and say, “That’s not for me to think about.” Then what is for you to think about?

Requirements analysis? Product definition? Or sales support? True, these are all things you should think about. But even if you do them all extremely well, even if your abilities there are formidable, you are at best the stuff of a good general, not of a commander-in-chief.

Why say that?

First, what is “strategy”? Simply put, strategy is the “guiding policy,” the “direction,” the “idea.” Applied to product management work, it asks: as a product manager, have you thought enough about the product’s long-term development? Do you know where the product is headed over the next five years? Do you have a forward read on the problems and opportunities of those five years?

We usually feel strategy is something huge, distant, sweeping, even empty. But you have to admit it is the foundation guiding every step of your work. And as a product manager, whether or not your actual job includes strategic planning (a real product manager must do product strategy planning for the company), you must possess this knowledge.

Project management

Seen as a process, a product is really one project phase stacked upon another. That is, the product manager is responsible for the process, and before it begins, that process cannot have its start and end marked out in time; the project manager is responsible for phases, and a phase’s start and end can be marked out before it begins.

From this you can see that in product management work, if you count your working time in “days,” each day is in fact soaked in the project of some concrete phase.

A market survey is a project for the marketing department; requirements definition is a project for the product department; product development is likewise a project for the engineering department. Many concrete projects, large and small, make up a product project, and multiple product projects make up the product process.

From this angle, then, the product manager is really running a peculiar project “whose beginning is known but whose end is not,” and all the knowledge and skills project management demands apply here as well, mainly including:

Drawing up project plans

Assessing project risks

Securing project resources

Managing the project team

Coordinating project issues

Controlling project schedule

…

So a product manager’s solid grasp of some project management knowledge and skills has, first and foremost, a very positive effect on the practical work.

Time management

You could say that apart from the necessary product strategy and product planning, a product manager’s work is almost entirely flooded with tactical, product-related tasks. But one person’s time and energy are finite, and getting as much of this work done as possible within finite time is where the knowledge and skills of time management come in.

In time management there are two most important concepts: efficiency and effectiveness.

Efficiency is the capacity to produce without wasting time; effectiveness is the capacity to put the right things first, and the quality of the work performed.

Put another way, the goal of time management is to strike the most suitable balance between “efficiency” and “effectiveness.”

These days nearly every product manager is playing “firefighter,” rushing around putting out “product fires.” By day’s end they are dead tired, yet the results disappoint, the important things often get shoved aside, and senior leadership concludes they are “neither efficient nor effective.”

To change this, strong time management skills are indispensable.

Team management

A product manager delivers results through other people; there is no question about that. “Other people” here includes every business department tied to the product process, usually marketing, technology, production, and sales.

You can imagine what a challenge it is for a product manager to manage a team that carries this double role of function and business.

And in precisely this team, the product manager holds no corresponding managerial power. How to manage it well is surely the biggest problem, and whether the product manager has the necessary team management skills directly determines the quality of what the product delivers.

So managing this product team well, without direct managerial authority, is simply beyond anyone who lacks excellent team management ability.

Core competency qualities

What is a product manager’s core knowledge? Without a doubt, it is the knowledge and ability of product management itself.

So what knowledge should a product manager master? The core knowledge a product manager should master covers five areas:

Product specification management

Product requirements management

Product project management

Product cycle management

Product brand management

Product specification management

First, two concepts to explain: product standards and product specifications. The biggest difference between a standard and a specification is that a standard is set by the authorities and carries mandatory, binding conditions, while a specification is set privately, a self-observed condition with no binding force. Applied to product standards and product specifications, you can understand it this way:

Product standards are usually stated plainly in the product information, for example national standards (GB), hygiene standards, and quality safety (QS). These are compulsory and administered by dedicated state agencies; the company is merely the executing party, and users are generally not familiar with these standards.

Product specifications are usually conveyed in intuitive form. Take bottled water: the volume is entirely up to the company, which may offer 600ml, 550ml, 595ml, and other volume options, and may set its own specifications for bottle-mouth diameter, say 2.5cm or 2cm. These specifications carry no mandatory requirements for the company and are managed entirely at its own discretion. Usually they originate in the needs of most users, and companies will also take the initiative to add product specifications to guide users. And users generally are familiar with these specifications.

From this you can see that product specifications are a kind of information no product can do without. Meanwhile, as products keep diversifying, specifications grow ever richer and gradually become one of the company’s marketing tools. In that situation the company must have someone dedicated to managing these product specifications, and the responsibility naturally lands on the product manager.

Product requirements management

We talk about requirements far too much, yet very few people talk, from the standpoint of product management, about which requirements a product manager should actually care about.

Much of our understanding of requirements is grounded in the traditional product itself, or even at the development level. Should a product manager care about those requirements? Yes, certainly. But caring only about those gives the product manager a one-sided understanding of requirements management.

The first level of requirements: commercial requirements. For these, you must understand what the company wants to achieve through this product. Is it to better realize the company’s strategic goals or even its vision? To grow revenue through the product? To extend the existing product line, open up a new market, or even purely to work the capital markets, in service of fundraising and a possible IPO?

Once the requirements at this commercial level are clear, you should then know how to plan the product. These are the business requirements: what business requirements aim to achieve is how to plan this product so that it better helps fulfill the company’s commercial expectations.

For example, if the company’s commercial requirement is to open up a new market, then the business requirement matched to it asks you to consider and plan a product direction and strategy capable of reaching that goal.

You may need to consider that reaching the set market goal could take five years. Then, over those five years, how should the product be planned? What investments will the company need, and in what amounts? What is the product goal at each stage, and what relationships should hold between those goals? And so on.

With these thought through, what follows is designing, according to the set plan, the product that will meet the corresponding goals. Say the first year’s goal is to give potential users a rough acquaintance with the new product and to establish a brand in the market, with the company’s investment merely exploratory. Then your concrete work needs to revolve around that goal. For instance, the fulfillment of functional requirements will be pared back; implementing the basic functions may be enough (by classification, functions divide into basic, extended, and value-added), because the company’s investment is exploratory and its goal is mainly to establish the brand and build awareness among potential users. Most of the investment will therefore go not into the product itself but into promotion, marketing, and the building of related affairs, such as constructing new channels.

Next come the project requirements, because fulfilling the business requirements certainly takes work completed piece by piece, and to the product manager, each of those pieces of work is a concrete project.

For the product manager, in truth, attention to requirements can stop here. Of course, going further down, more requirements can be carved out: beneath project requirements there are requirements for specific product versions, and beneath version requirements, requirements at the development level. In product management, these really do not need to be the focus.

Following the standard product management process, once the product manager has finished the MRD and the PRD, the requirements work can in fact be brought to a close.

One more point to stress here: the “user needs” and “market needs” we usually speak of are in fact all contained within the three kinds of requirements above.

The reason is simple: a product actually carries the appeals of both the company and the users. What we must do is unify these two kinds of appeals and satisfy both sides’ expectations and goals with a single product.

And commercial requirements, business requirements, and project requirements let the product manager attend to both kinds at once.

This is really what the purpose of product management demands, for the purpose of product management is “to safeguard the company’s competitive advantage and the customer’s long-term satisfaction.”

Understand this, and you understand how to do requirements management well.

Product project management

Mastering project management knowledge is viewed entirely from the angle of project management; that is, we must learn the knowledge of project management. Product project management, though, is viewed entirely from the angle of product management; that is, this knowledge means using what we have learned from project management to guide the concrete work of product management.

Product cycle management

Note that this does not say product life cycle management, because as commonly understood, the product life cycle refers to “the process by which a product appears on the market, develops, and is finally phased out; it is an economic phenomenon of product succession.”

In other words, a product’s life cycle begins at its launch and ends at its withdrawal. For the product manager, though, reality goes beyond that: the work covers not only the stretch from launch to withdrawal but also a great deal of earlier work. That is to say, the product management process is not limited to product life cycle management; product life cycle management is merely one phase of the product manager’s work.

Put that way it still sounds a bit too academic. More simply, what does product cycle management include? Two stages:

(1) the stage of making the product; (2) the stage of selling the product.

The making stage contains most of the work in product project management (everything except commercialization), while the selling stage is the commercialization work among the tactical activities.

Then why do we talk so much more about product life cycle management?

Because product life cycle management is the stage of product cycle management where market value is exchanged. Realistically speaking, this stage is the most attractive and tempting to the company; it is, after all, the process where revenue is realized, and so companies attach enormous weight to the work of this stage.

Think about it: the marketing, the promotion, all the sales campaigns and schemes that companies now prize so highly, don’t they all sit within this stage of product life cycle management?

Besides this, there is also the fact that domestic companies have all along produced in a “sales-oriented” way, giving little weight to early-stage strategy and planning, believing that with good marketing no product can sell badly. On that line of thinking, there will certainly never be any holistic, long-range consideration.

But markets evolve. Sales-oriented production is bound to be replaced by market-oriented production; that is an inevitable trend. Companies will certainly come, step by step, to value the early work, and what we product managers need to do is prepare for it, stock up the necessary knowledge and skills, so that in the end we come when called, fight when we come, and win when we fight!

I will keep this brief; it is enough to know that product cycle > product life cycle. A product manager must understand not only how to sell a product well but also how to make a product well. We often say a product should be “marketable and on target,” but as I see it, it should really be “on target, then marketable,” because being “on target” is the premise, that is, making the product well, while “marketable” is the result, that is, selling the product well.

Understood this way it is even simpler: a product manager does nothing more than these two jobs well. But doing them well takes serious effort.

Product brand management

Ever since the financial crisis of ‘08 and the state’s call for industrial upgrading, media of every kind, along with many companies that used to do contract manufacturing, have been stressing one idea: take the road of building your own brand.

Having the idea is good. But from notion to practice to reaching the goal, have these companies steeled themselves for all the risks and costs along the way?

From the company’s angle, a brand is a symbol grounded in the medium of the product; from the user’s angle, a brand is the user’s emotional identification with the product. Just think how hard it is to turn a cold symbol into a value in the user’s mind.

But is building a brand really that simple?

Naturally not. Building a brand is nearly as difficult as planning a product.

Take the simplest task, designing the brand name. A name is not something you can just sit in the office and puzzle out; it likewise takes a great deal of analysis.

First you must determine your target users, because their characteristics shape how they perceive and accept your brand. For example, if your product’s target users are middle-aged and elderly people living in the countryside, then your brand name certainly must not be overly complicated or foreign-sounding; best is a name that fits rural culture, and it has to be simple, easy to grasp, and easy to spread.

Next, once the name is settled, you must also consider the matching logo, slogan, channels of communication, forms of communication, how to differentiate from competitors’ brands, and how to evaluate the brand’s effect after launch, and so on.

What work does this involve?

At the very least: market segmentation, target customer definition, competitive landscape analysis (at the brand level), product brand creative, differentiation analysis, marketing strategy formulation (at the brand level), promotion plan design, advertising design, communication channel design, and so on. And later brand maintenance is yet another major undertaking.

From this you can see that brand management is not simply designing a brand, producing an ad, and putting it in the media; it likewise needs a mass of meticulous work to hold it up.

Of course, the product manager cannot, and need not, do every item above personally; much of the work still requires the team’s cooperation. But in brand management the product manager should at the very least make clear to the company and the team:

(1) Who our brand is to reach

(2) How our brand can differ from competitors’

(3) What message our brand should carry to target users (quality? service? price? psychological satisfaction? self-realization?)

(4) How our brand can be delivered where it needs to go

(5) How to evaluate the brand’s communication effect

(6) How to protect our brand from harm

And this is only the work of bringing a new brand into the world. Managing an existing brand is no small job either. Say a new product is being launched: you must consider whether the existing product brand can support the new product’s growth. If it can, how should the existing brand be extended? If it cannot, does a new brand need to be designed from scratch? Moreover, if the company already has brands at multiple tiers, you must also consider what kind of relationship the extended or new brand should have with the brands at other tiers so that the relationship reinforces and harmonizes rather than interferes.

All of this belongs to the product manager’s brand management work.

Finally, why should the product manager do brand management at all?

It comes down to one point: making products is really managing the company’s resources, and the brand, as a corporate resource the product cannot do without (abroad, the brand exists as a strategic resource), naturally becomes an important aspect for us to watch over and manage well.