UX and product managers
On the Mind the Product blog, Martin Eriksson writes,
I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience. A good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners in all.
To Martin's list I would change UX to expertise on the market (or persona). I've written about expertise in product management in my free ebook. (Download it here).
User experience (UX) is an area that befuddles many product managers. Ideally, product managers should be focused on the customer problem while development designs the company's solution. A strong dev team will propose one or more solutions to the articulated problem, allowing the product manager to accept the best option by leveraging his or her business, technical, marketing, and domain knowledge. A UX designer is a critical element of a successful product team.
If you're interested in UX design (and all product managers should be), take a look at The User Experience Guidebook for Product Managers from the helpful folks at UXPin.
About Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson is a product management process coach, author, speaker, and advisor. His approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product marketing and management team. Before founding Under10, Steve was a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for over 15 years and personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams. Learn more at www.under10playbook.com
In his spare time, Steve enjoys making music, and has an album available on iTunes. Check out Steve’s music at notExactlySteve.com