Product Management Is Business Leadership

Product management is business leadership.

I’ve spent much of my career with the title Product Manager.

But I learned many of the most important lessons about product management before I ever had the title.

I learned them designing electronic products.On manufacturing floors.Working through production problems.Talking with suppliers.Watching products fail.Listening to customers.Trying to understand why one product made money while another—sometimes a technically excellent one—didn’t.

Those experiences changed the way I think about product management.

A product manager isn’t simply the person who manages a roadmap or prioritizes features.

The product leader sits at the intersection of:

Customer.Market.Technology.Engineering.Operations.Economics.Commercialization.

The job is to understand how those pieces fit together and make decisions that increase the value of the product business.

Sometimes that means developing something new.Sometimes it means simplifying the portfolio.Sometimes it means changing the supplier model.Sometimes it means changing pricing.

And sometimes the smartest product decision is deciding not to build something at all.

That’s why I increasingly think of product management as a form of general management.

A product isn’t successful because we shipped it.

It’s successful when customers value it and the business can profitably deliver it.

What would you add to that definition of product leadership?