Why You need a Product Management Certificate

What is Product Management?

What is that one product that has become heavily interwoven with your life and even positively affected your life in such a way, that you can not even imagine what your life looked like before you had? The level of thought that went into the process of making such a product to fit nicely into your life is what Product Management is all about. Simply put that, Product management is the strategic function that governs the step-by-step lifecycle of a product from development, positioning, and even pricing with heavy consideration to the customers’ needs.

Product Management as Role.

In every tech organization, the product management personnel or leaders serve as the bridge between businesses, customers, the market, and technology. This role is very critical to driving growth in organizations because they can effectively translate business goals into amazing strategies and of course results. They do this by implementing efficient product roadmaps and ensuring an efficient product management structure.

Product Management Responsibilities. The role a product management personnel plays in any organization, tech or not can be overemphasized mostly because of its pivotal role in advancing business goals and objectives. Some of the core responsibilities of a product manager are;

• Acts as customer liaison. A product manager interfaces constantly with the market and customers to understand their pain points and how his/her organization’s product can be fine-tuned to meet those needs. He/she works closely with the design, marketing, engineering teams providing them with feedback and suggestions.

• Has technical product knowledge or specific domain expertise. For a product manager to thrive, he/she most must have developed a significant amount of knowledge in the field. Understanding detailed aspects of what goes into a product, the processes involved and the skills required to achieve a viable product all fall within the scope of what a product manager should be aware of. 

• A product manager conducts beta tests and pilot programs. Constantly revises completed work and ensures that the product can meet the customers’ needs.

• A product manager serves as a business development specialist, he/she develops business cases for new products and advises on new markets interest a business can pursue.

• Product managers play vital roles in suggesting price points for products and services. This is necessary to keep the business profitable and competitive.

Product Management Tools

Going further along the line of things discussed under the roles and responsibilities of a product manager, let’s take a look at the tools that every product manager needs to have to enable them to function as effectively as possible. A list of them is;

• This helps with analysing user behaviour as it concerns your product or service. Every product manager should be able to gain insights on customer usage and brand interactions and such tools help with providing detailed data that should inform on improving customer experience.

• Road-mapping Software. This is a must-have for every product manager. Now you need to understand that as a product manager, part of being articulate with the vision of the product can only be made easy when there is a visual framework that your teams can easily follow. Road-mapping applications help with providing such visual frameworks. Some of the popular ones are; monday.com, Craft.io, Zoho Sprints, Tara, SharpCloud, ProdPad, ProductPlan, Airfocus, Productboard, Roadmap Planner.

• Customer Survey Tools. This is self-explanatory, you would want to collect feedback and opinions from customers as often as needed and act promptly on such feedback. Survey Monkey, Typeform are just a few of the customer survey tools out there.

• This is should have come immediately after road-mapping tools considering that they follow each other in importance as well as complement each other. As a product manager, you want to be able to sell your vision and strategy to your team or superiors. Your ability to communicate these ideas will provide a winning edge for you as a product manager.

• Team Management Tools. As a product manager, you are also a product leader, and effectively managing your team is one of your core responsibilities. You want to be able to assign tasks, follow up, review and revise completed tasks. A team management tool makes conducting these responsibilities a lot easier. Applications like Jira, Discord, Trello to mention a few can get the job done.

• Team Messaging Tools. When you think of a tool that helps with seamless team messaging, Slack comes to mind. It provides you and your team with a more organized way of passing information instantly and getting responses in a way that gives the email a run for its money.

Product Management is pretty intriguing, fulfilling as it is rewarding for anyone who chooses to embark on it as a career path. While this is true, it will be noteworthy to point out that there are principles in Product management you should use as guiding parameters. They are;

• Understanding problem. Right behind asking the ‘why’ questions, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ follow closely. At this point, you are pushing yourself to look at all sides of a problem. Take the problem, break it down into bits and see the intricacies that lie within. This helps to gain a broader perspective on the problem and enables out-of-the-box thinking that eventually puts you and your team in a position to craft the desired solution to it.

• Focus Relentlessly. Now you have your questions and possible answers. You would need to test whatever hypothesis you developed, check out for viability repeatedly. At the bottom line of these is the need to execute efficiently while keeping the team constantly focused on the goal that needs to be achieved. 

• Empower the Team. Like a good meal, a product is a mix of several variables that come together and complement one another. You have your goals, you have your customers to cater to, you need to ensure your team possesses the right mindset, skills, and motivation to bring it all to fruition. Engage your team, assess its strengths and weakness, create buffers where necessary, and equip them with the right tool and knowledge, and the level of professionalism they require.

• Embrace Uncertainty. Nothing is ever certain. You wow moments as a product leader and manager often come from outcomes that are not always envisioned from the beginning. Keep an open mind, adaptability is the name of the game. Remember that while you can be focused on achieving results, you can be flexible in the methods you choose the application. At the end of the day, the results will count for all the effort made.

• Balance Inputs, Outputs, Outcomes, and Learning. Being a product manager implies that you are responsible for bringing balance to the team. Understand this and maintain it to keep things from vying off course. Be quick to identify opportunities that may present themselves and use them to advance your team and your product or service.

• Rinse and repeat. Do this to processes at different levels of product development, customer interaction, team building, and so on. Test repeatedly, try again, and even when you get something that works, replicate it.

Product Management is a high-skill role. People that get to wear the hats are people who have mostly attained MBAs. But that should not deter you, as there are courses you can take to get your foot in the door. You can get such courses for free or paid on Coursera, Udemy, SkillShare, etc.