Developing your company’s first product can be all consuming. Commercially, it will determine your business success and future growth. It will also reveal your Brand values (intentionally or not!) in how you trade-off the performance, quality and price of your product. And it will set precedents for your future customer relationships.
Your first product development will also be your first major project. This should involve Marketing, Sales, Finance and Operations as well as your R&D team, as they will all have expectations to manage. But a Product is not defined by a single project, and eventually it becomes an entity of its own. After launching it, the project manager will inevitably move onto developing new features or the next version. At this point, ‘ownership’ of the new product often moves into the commercial function. And so it should.
At Inca Digital Printers, we hired our first Product Manager in our fifth year (thank you Roger Walkley!). By this time, we had already launched a few products, which were becoming quite demanding. As a young R&D Director, the Product Manager role was a new concept to me, but I quickly realised that some of what I was doing was really someone else’s job. Now the company was over 100 employees, we could afford to wear fewer hats and define clearer roles. It was great to have somebody looking after our Products from the customers’ point of view.
The Product Manager’s Role
In my view, the Product Manager’s role is inherently cross-functional. Although they often report into the CMO or CCO, many good ProdM’s have a technical background. This helps them communicate effectively with both the development and commercial teams to negotiate compromises between desirability, feasibility, and viability. They help shape new models, oversee improvements, and eventually manage the withdrawal or replacement of the Product.
The whole Product life cycle may involve several projects as it progresses from cradle to grave. Development, cost reduction, major bug fixes and even scrapping a Product can involve significant project management effort. But these stages are all just part of a Product’s evolution, for which it needs a single owner. The Product Manager is the project managers’ internal ‘customer’.
Looking back, I think Inca should have hired a Product Manager sooner. I suspect this is true of many technology-led firms. So if your first product is nearing launch, and project management is starting to become broader than just development, then it might be time to think about hiring a Product Manager.
If you’d like to discuss how to manage your Projects and Products, please get in touch!