Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

One of the biggest misconceptions about the role of a product manager is that they own the entire product and therefore can tell everyone what to build. Act this way, and you will only alienate the rest of your team. Product managers really own the “why” of what they are building.

Although Scrum has a lot of information on the processes and rituals of what to do as a product owner, it leaves lots of questions unanswered and these questions are important for creating successful products: How do we determine value? How do we measure the success of our products in the market? How do we make sure we are building the right thing? How do we price and package our product? How do we bring our product to market? What makes sense to build versus buy? How can we integrate with third-party software to enter new markets?

product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product manager is a career.

Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next. Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there. Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future state and that aligns the teams around the work.