Brian Lawley

Are you just starting out as a product manager or looking for a guide to becoming better at what you already do every day? The role of a product manager can be a strategic business driver for your company and, as such, a lot of people are watching closely to see what direction you take them in.This Cheat Sheet offers a guide to the different people product managers interact with, arms you with the skill set needed to catapult you to "great" status, and shows you how to acknowledge and resolve conflicts.

A product begins life as a small thought: a "what-if" spark that captures the imagination. But before a product sees the light of day or reaches the customer's hands, it must go through a series of phases that involves all the departments within a company.These seven phases capture everything that happens with a product throughout its entire life and all critical decisions that must be made.

You may know of a commonly used product life cycle that starts from the premise that a product is in the market. It has four phases: Introduction: The goal in this phase is to build market awareness for the product. The job here is to educate customers as to the value of the product. Growth: During the growth phase, the company is guiding market share and creating brand preference in the eyes of the customer.

As a product manager, finding what doesn't work is sometimes easier that knowing what is working well. If you see the following symptoms, most likely your process isn't very effective. Decision making is extended. Every decision is hard fought and can be arbitrarily reversed at any time. And once you are allowed to start the next phase, you're often in a rush to complete your product.

Becoming a great product manager is the work of a lifetime. The work is complicated. The skills and talents that you have to bring to the role are many. And just when you think you've mastered them all, you realize you haven't used one in a while and need more practice. Having the characteristics and skills of an amazing product manager make the job a great one if you like variety and challenges.

As organizations grow, the complexity of who is responsible for doing what becomes greater. Product managers have a long list of responsibilities, and making sure that everyone is clear on what they need to be involved in and what they can safely pass onto other roles is important to document.There are two management tools that are useful for making sure that everyone knows who participates in finishing an activity and who makes a decision about a particular topic: RACI: Who is responsible for completing certain tasks?

As product manager, you touch almost every part of an organization and may not even realize it. Only many years after you've left a product management role and find someone in an obscure part of the company who recognizes you do you realize the extent of your reach. It's a humbling thought. One excellent practice is to swing through the building once or twice a day checking in with key functions.

Someone once compared product management to refrigerator function. You don't notice when it's running well, but when it's broken, things start to stink. Remember that when you do your job well, the company hums much better — even if it doesn't know you're the source of the humming. There is less confusion and more direction.

Agile is a flexible way of developing products that mostly applies to software development. Agile has two very specific roles that you don't see in other development environments: the product owner and the scrum master.The scrum master is typically only used in a specific version of Agile called scrum. The following figure illustrates which responsibilities lie exclusively with the product manager (PM), which are shared according to preference and skill between the product owner (PO) and product manager, and which are specifically allocated to a product owner.