Product Manager

In the food industry, gourmands are all about “farm-to-table” cuisine, which requires Chefs and diners alike to know where their food comes from. This includes where and how it’s grown, harvested, packaged, transported, and sold, the idea being to cook and consume food that’s as pure and as local as possible.

As a Product Manager, you couldn’t care less where carrots are picked and eggs hatched. Like farm-to-table Chefs, however, Product Managers are extremely interested in the lifecycle of your products—although they typically originate in factories instead of farms.

In fact, it’s the job of the Product Manager to manage that lifecycle, including all the processes that move products from “farm” (the Product Designer) to “table” (the consumer).

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a computer, lamp, book, boat, or six-pack of beer. Your job is to oversee and integrate the product’s design, production, distribution, sales, and marketing.

That makes you like the CEO of a thing—a widget—instead of a company. While your team includes Product Designers, Engineers, Salespeople, Marketers, etc., they’re all focused on discrete tasks. It’s up to you, therefore, to see and manage the bigger picture, making sure that all the pieces—price, market, message, etc.—fit together in pursuit of high-quality products and high-volume sales.

Products typically go through four distinct stages: launch, growth, maturation, and saturation. By allocating resources, managing processes, and creating strategies, you guide your products through each stage to make sure they’re as successful as possible until it’s time to retire them in favor of version 2.0.