Product Marketing Manager: The Job of Showing The Money

One of the key jobs of the product manager is to make the business case. She is passionate about a new service OVES. She has put in lot of effort to understand similar services, upcoming ones in market, think of differentiating features, estimating revenue potential and so on.

For the project, she is going to do the following

• Business plan
• Meeting customers and getting inputs
• Constantly clarifying the requirements to R&D teams
• Product launches and support

Yet, the hard thing is in selling the idea to everyone. To the top management, to R&D and to sales. Each one is complex. R&D would say that time is not enough to give the product release by specified date. For sticking to the date, feature needs to be cut down. And, certain features can not be feasible. With reduced features, the price can not simply be the same. With reduced price, the higher volume has to be shown. Else the ROI number won’t look good enough for the number crunchers at top management. The sales says that you need great differentiators and at half the cost. Yet the user interface should intuitive enough so that it would require zero training. Hmm.

As product manager, she needs to be really smart. Has to have brain for technology, domain, business, domain regulations, legal aspects and organization dynamics.  She is not just an MBA. She had good hold of everything mattered for the project.

Finally approval happens. But only for prototype phase with USD300k budget

The Other Product Manager Role

There is a second role labeled as product manager. This product manager would be more technical and systems person. Can expand marketing requirements and generate system requirements which an architect can take forward. Many times this role is split between other roles and no dedicated person performing this job.