By Vinay Konanur, Senior Director, Emerging Technologies, UNext Learning
If we were to illustrate the core aspects of the software development cycle in a Venn diagram, Product Management would certainly be in the middle. Product Managers lie at the heart of all operations in a software development company, taking charge of multiple tasks and donning diverse hats to ensure that a product not only sees the light of the day but meticulously serves its purpose as well.
The VP of product at LinkedIn – Deep Nishar – shared, “A great Product Manager has the brain of a manager, the heart of a design and the speech of a diplomat.” An ideal Product Manager can get things done faster, seamlessly implement agile and DevOps strategies, optimize product performance and all this while simultaneously ensuring their teams are interestingly challenged.
Statistics also reveal that an ideal Product Manager can increase an organization’s profits by around 34.2%. While there are challenges in the Product Management spectrum, there is no doubt that Product Management boosts the performance and productivity of teams and ultimately the organization.
For organizations that are still unsure if Product Management can redirect their business towards optimized performance and profits, here are some compelling reasons why it does.
Product Management Is Inevitable To Boost IT Performance And Productivity
Moving Away From Siloed Operations
One of the frustrating challenges in business operations is the presence of stagnant, redundant and unorganized data across teams. Siloed operations bring down the performances of teams drastically and result in poor performance of the final product as well. However, Product Management crafts a single point of truth, where data and crucial pieces of insights that multiple teams require to perform their tasks are available as interoperable sets.
Collaborative development is one of the prominent aspects of agile and DevOps methodologies and Product Management stems from this practice, ensuring a unanimous understanding and access to data for all team members.
The Bigger Picture And The Pixels That Make It
A team can perform to its fullest potential when it knows both the bigger picture and the micro-tasks that lead to it. An equal understanding of goals and the translation of individual efforts is key in boosting meaningful productivity and Product Management achieves this seamlessly.
With Product Management, team members have a clear roadmap of the path ahead of them and the best practices to keep them aligned to this at any given point in time. The best part about Product Management is that it even accommodates changes, revisits and last-minute modifications to this roadmap and the teams will still be able to deliver without major glitches.
Consistent Optimization Of Processes
A well-laid out, well-established process can sometimes be too rigid for team members to follow. Tasks, their challenges and their respective intensities tend to evolve at different phases of the software development cycle. That’s why a one-approach-fits-all procedure often acts as a constraining factor to efficiency of team members.
However, Product Management is flexible in the fact that processes can be revisited and modified at any time so inefficiencies of all scales can be done away with seamlessly and just like the product teams are developing collaboratively, processes and workflows are consistently evolving as well.
Final Thoughts
At this point, we have come too far from questioning whether Product Management is essential to boost productivity and performance. It has become part of culture and a collective subconscious memory for teams across organizations.
Product Management does yield incredible results if teams are led by qualified and able Product Managers. So, if there’s something that needs a revisit, it’s the competency and experience of your Product Manager. Are they equipped with all the necessary competences required to realize your business goals?
