Welcome to the first lesson with me. I’m Aly Owens and I will be teaching you product management.

Let's clarify the definition of a product manager and the job responsibilities.

A PM is responsible for the product vision, the strategy long and short term, he/she will work with customers to gather the requirements and understand their needs. The PM also plays a major role in solutioning. Basically, we don't just ask customers how they'd like the product to work. We ask what the customer is experiencing and what he/she is struggling to do.

The reasons could be either the lack of functionality or the complexity of an existing feature. We, as product managers, also define and track metrics that matter to the health and success of the product.

And of course, other than building features that matter, a pm hosts roadmap planning sessions and ensures that committed work is delivered and future work is agreed upon with stakeholders and the dev team.

Many nuances of pm work may vary based on a company. For example a product built for B2B will work differently than a similar solution for B2C.

Many people confuse a project manager with a product manager. In short, a project manager is responsible that a project gets from point A to point B.

A project also has a beginning and an end. A project may involve collaboration of several products, integrations, mergers.

Each project goes through 5 main phases: initiation, planning, implementation, monitoring and control and closing. It comes from waterfall methodology.

A project manager goes from a project to a project.

A product manager may work on the same product his/her entire career.

Today agile methodology is prevailing and products are being built in iterations.

Also, a product manager has the power to decide the direction of the product.

He/she makes decisions what features are going to be built and included in the product and what doesn't align with the product mission. Not every product will have a mission but every product will have a vision that rolls up to a company mission.

Now, depending on the company, it's size and complexity, you might have both program and product managers.

Product management is strategically driving the development, market launch, and continual support and improvement of its products.

Program management involves identifying and coordinating the interdependencies among projects, products, and other important strategic initiatives across an organization.

I hope this gives you a much better understanding of the job. So now, let's dig into it. Watch the next learning block where I'll teach you how to define a product vision, build a business model canvas and create OKRs.