Product Management

Area Description

As a company or team grows, how does it ensure that newcomers share the same vision that inspired the organization’s creation? This is the goal of product management as a formalized practice.

Product strategy was largely tacit in Context I. The founder or individual used product management and product discovery practices, and may well be familiar with the ideas here, but the assumption is that they did not explicitly formalize their approach to them. Now the team needs a more prescriptive and consistent approach to discovering, defining, designing, communicating, and executing a product vision.

This Competency Area defines and discusses product management, and distinguishes it from project and process management. It covers how product teams are formed and what practices and attitudes should be established quickly.

Product management has various schools of thought and practices, including Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s Lean UX, Scrum, and more specific techniques for product “discovery” [Gothelf & Seiden 2013]. The concepts of design and design thinking are important philosophical foundations.