Product Management 101– Part 2

What is a product?

It really could be anything

This might seem like a silly question but it’s a topic that you really need to pay attention to as a product manager. (Well obviously, because _product_ manager duh.)

Everyone knows what a product is. Of course, except everyone who doesn’t.

The user is always worthy, is the product worthy?

A product could be anything, it could be the mouse that you are using, it could be your computer, it could be a phone, it could even be the latte that you drink on your way to work.

The web browser that you are reading this on is a product.

All of these things are products by the classical definition.

So do all product managers manage an entire device or software?

A product manager is someone who manages a given product. However, it is not always the case that a product manager is in charge of an entire device or a piece of software.

A useful definition for a product would be: Anything a business sells or markets that solves a market problem or addresses a customer’s need or desire.

This definition implies that almost everything that we deal with on a day to day basis to make our lives easier is a product. One would naturally think of a computer as being an entire product, but go a little deeper and you’ll realize that the keyboard solves a very specific problem of being able to effectively provide input to the computer. If you go even deeper, you’ll realize that the keys on a keyboard provide the users with much desired haptic feedback.

These are all products as all of these solve market problems. And this has a wider implication, each feature of products that we are familiar with solve problems or fulfill a desire.

So are these small features products too?

Let’s take the example of Instagram. When you use IG, you are actually using a multitude of different features. At a company like that each feature is so vital and complex that it is usually assigned to a group of people called a product team or feature team to manage it. So IG Direct Messaging is one product. It’s a feature but it’s called a product in product management lingo. The IG feed, user profile and all the filters are products too.

Every single one of these products is managed by a product manager and worked on by a team of designers, engineers and analysts who make up the product team or the feature team.

The news feed of Instagram has multiple product teams working on it. This might seem unnecessary, but it’s such a big piece of technology that different teams are required to work on different parts of this one single feature-product; One team works on the ranking algorithm, another team works on the structure of the tiles, and so on.

We’ve seen how products that we had previously assumed to be one single product is made up of many more tiny products.

But instead of splitting stuff up, can we lump them together and call them products?

We absolutely can.

There are cases where products are not split up by the features in larger applications or pieces of software, but rather split up by platform. In a company, there maybe a product team in charge of the entire web application and another product team in charge of the android app and yet another on in charge of everything iOS. This is just a different model of working.

Some products really do be unnecessary

So different smaller features can be grouped together and can be seen as being one big product or a big product can be thought of as being made of smaller products. It is totally up to you and the people you work with.