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The product manager in technology

The product manager (or sometimes product owner, with some differences and some abuse of language) plays an essential role in technology because he is at the heart of the mechanics of the offer. His or her decisions can therefore commit the company’s future for long periods of time, due to both the importance of the technical investments and the often long life of the product on the market.

Its role in practice is quite different from that of its counterpart in the general public.

Product manager in technology: what responsibilities?

The product manager is responsible for his product (or product line) from its conception to its end of life. He or she is often responsible for both the technical and the market/customer dimensions of the product, but these two dimensions may sometimes be entrusted to two different managers who must then coordinate closely.

In the technological world, the product manager is essentially a network leader who must define the strategy for his product and also prepare or take (depending on the governance of the company) successive decisions marking the life of his product before and after its launch on the market. Depending on the size and organisation of the company and on his or her skills, he or she may or may not be directly in charge of the technical dimension of the product.

It is interesting at this point to compare the role of the product manager in technology with that of his counterpart in the general public.

Product Manager B2C vs B2B / B2G

The B2C product manager

In the general public, the product manager evolves within a company where marketing and communication are king, which is legitimate since a good part of the differentiation is carried by communication and image while the technical dimension is often less advanced. It is therefore largely the product manager who will decide quite autonomously what the product should be and how it should be positioned, while at the same time asking to benefit from the innovations that R&D can offer for his product. He will benefit from innovations according to the ‘brand policy’ of his marketing department. The latter will decide that such and such a technological innovation (there are of course some in the general public) will be reserved for such and such a product or brand in the product and brand portfolio. Once the product has been launched, it will then be largely a matter of maintaining advertising pressure at the right level to maintain sales through successive campaigns generally entrusted to communication agencies.

The consumer product manager is therefore essentially an expert in marketing and communicating his or her product to the consumer, an expert who will often be able to rely on numerous studies or panels as well as on a set of “data” from the market and from consumers, data that B2C companies have now learned to generate and use effectively.

The product manager in high-tech B2B / B2G

The situation of the technology product manager is quite different:

  • First of all, they work in a company where marketing is not the king but technology is.
  • Secondly, the technical complexity of his product means that he is most often a technician or engineer, both for reasons of credibility with customers and internal credibility. This is because the position of product manager in technology is as much a dialogue with the technical side as a purely marketing position. This is not without its problems: because of their generally technical background, product managers in technology are not spontaneously familiar with the tools of strategy and marketing and how to apply them to a technically advanced world, markets and products.
  • Moreover, even if he has a leading role in preparing or taking decisions concerning his product, the technology product manager will have to dialogue or negotiate constantly with an important internal “network” made up of both technical experts and experts in all the specialities that are essential to his product, such as legal for intellectual property, ecodesign for the environmental impact of the product, purchasing for external purchases which can represent a very large part of the product or system (here again unlike B2C), services for example for the notion of “serviceability” which must be involved from the design of the product, a network of partners or countries to ensure the proper reception of the product and sometimes modify it to make it adaptable to local constraints or regulations.
  • Technical aspects are obviously essential in the tasks of the technological product manager if he or she is in charge of both technical aspects and market/customer aspects: they concern, in particular, technical innovation, the technical architecture of products, detailed specifications, compliance with specifications, the reuse of elements between products or projects, competitiveness in general, technical roadmaps, ‘make or buy’, obsolescence management, updates and upgrades, preparation of future generations of products, management of transitions between products, etc.
  • As a result, the “product plan” for which the technology product manager will be responsible will cover technical, financial, legal, purchasing and service aspects as well as purely marketing aspects such as positioning, differentiation and target price.
  • Secondly, the “stagegates” that will mark out the life of the product from the idea to the end of its life will generally be more numerous than in B2C and will include several extremely important stages before the commercial launch: for example, business feasibility, technical feasibility, technical architecture, authorisation to incur development costs, etc.
  • Finally, the technology product manager will generally not be able to rely on a large number of public studies or necessarily on marketing data that is only just beginning to be operational in the technology. He or she will therefore have to rely heavily on customer feedback obtained directly or through sales, business development or users’ clubs, for example.
  • Despite this, he/she will need to have a clear vision of his/her market ecosystem and anticipate its evolution, understand the needs of customers that are more diverse and complex than those of the consumer, analyse customer value in relation to that of competitors or substitute technologies, decide on the positioning, differentiation and value proposition of his/her product, articulate the actions linked to the commercial launch and accompany the product through its successive evolutions or versions while controlling its profitability until it is withdrawn from the market and frequently until the end of the availability of the associated services.

All these elements create a profile of the product manager in technology that is quite different from that of the general public product manager: as much a technical man as a marketing man, and even more so than in B2C, fundamentally a man of leadership and negotiation within a network.

So what about the “product owner” ?

The term was initially associated with the “scrum framework”, which would become the most widely used approach to agile methods. Agile methods are development methods that aim to make product development more flexible and faster. They are particularly well suited to software and digital development but are not exclusively reserved for them. Flexibility and speed are based on successive iterations involving both the development team and the customer.

So we can say:

  • That the terms product manager and product owner designate similar positions, beyond the very frequent confusion of vocabulary
  • That the product owner is associated with an agile development method, whereas the product manager exists regardless of the development method.
  • That the product owner is more likely to be in the short term because of the back and forth between successive versions and the customer
  • That he often belongs to the IT and digital world

While the product manager :

  • Tends to be more strategic and medium to long term
  • Is associated with more sequential development methods, better adapted to complex products or systems requiring high investments and not lending itself to “test and learn”.
  • Belongs to all high-tech B2B/B2G worlds

In all cases, there may be bridges from the position of product manager to that of product owner and vice versa.

Michel PERRIN

Graduate of the world-renowned HEC Paris Business School , Michel Perrin was previously Director of Strategy & Marketing for a large European logistics group, before deciding to focus on consulting and training. He has developed and delivered custom training programs in B2B Marketing for the Executive Education programs at HEC for more than 15 years. He is currently head of PI Developpement, a consultancy company dedicated to advising and training technology companies in marketing and product policies.

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