What is a Product Manager?

I'm currently in Placement Two of my Graduate Programme at Vodafone which is a Product Manager role within the Innovation team. Now, when people ask my role, they often mishear my title and thing I say Project Manager! However, the role of Product Manager is distinctly different. If you're a recent graduate, student, interested in marketing roles or have even just heard of Product Managers within your organisation and wondered what the hell it is- let me fill you in on a Day in the Life of a Product Manager.

Product Managers are not a million miles away from Brand Managers, however this depends on the type of organisation. A firm with an umbrella brand and lots of sub-brands e.g. Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle etc. will probably have a lot more Brand Managers than an organisation which feeds from the strength one core brand e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, Samsung and my company, Vodafone, who primarily employ Product Managers. However, effectively the two roles are pretty similar.

On a very high level, Product Managers oversee everything which concerns a certain product. They try and drive usage/ sales/ downloads/ customer satisfaction/ whatever other KPIs marketers pluck out of their objectives and make sure the product is performing. This effectively means you have to make the maximum revenue from your product and ensure your product is doing exactly what it should be doing for the business. This of course, means you must align your product to fit in with the wider business strategy and listen to the needs of the business before you decide exactly how to market your product.

You must also be very close to and focused on the customer. Understand their every need and get feedback on the user experience, which includes a lot of testing, testing and more testing! As a Product Manager, there is also a technical understanding of your product/s needed on a higher level, to know exactly how they work, what is possible and how to develop them.

As all products go through a life cycle, it is important to understand the different times within product managing, right through from launch, growth, maturity, decline and then either rejuvenation or closing/ discontinuing a product. You as Product Manager will oversee all of these stages and
literally be the expert on this product for its entire life!

Launch

Before you can launch a product you need a need that this problem solves for the customer, backed up by a bunch of research! With a deep understanding of the market and your target audience, as well as a real passion for the product, as you are going to have to be the salesperson to every single person inside and outside of the business.

Growth

You then continually plan roadmaps for your product to understand exactly where you want it to go and how you are going to get it there. This might be working super closely with developers, marketing communications activity or user experience improvements. You have to have super attention to detail as you pick out every little nit-picky error or problem with your product and put it right! There are always problems along the way which need solving.

Maturity

This is where you can look at your product and gather enough data about it to understand exactly what customers like and dislike about it. Do you need to make a price change, completely change the product's features or invest heavily in marketing to keep your numbers up?

Decline

Upon the product's decline you can consider two options, closing the product or revitalising it entirely. The businesses' goals may have changed, the market may have changed or the product may simply be too costly to make a profit anymore. This is where you can consider targeting a new audience, changing the structure of the product or redesigning it.

My Role

My role within Product Management is of course within a mobile technology brand and I manage a number of apps. Day-to-day I may be speaking to app developers to improve our user experience on the apps, speaking to various functions within the business such as Brand to get one of our images in the app approved, Digital to get a webpage which mentions my app changed, CVM to promote our app through an email or SMS campaign, Customer Services to make sure the agents know exactly what to say if a customer asks a question about my product or even liaising with Market Research teams to understand how much customers are enjoying my apps!

The role is super varied and means you can really put your passions and energy in to one or two products and they are your entire responsibility- which can be a good OR bad thing, depending on how well your product is doing!

If you have any questions or are interested in a Product Management role, please tweet me at @stefclark

I'll do my next role profile within Placement 2!

Stephanie

Career Choices

I was lucky enough to be able to volunteer to work at the Bristol University careers fair on Tuesday representing IBM and inspiring students to apply to the internship, placement and graduate schemes that IBM offer. 

 The careers fair looked awesome in the University Great Hall!

As a UWE student I found this quite daunting, the two universities are historically and brutally, rivals. I was pleasantly surprised that everyone I spoke to was extremely friendly and even when asked what I studied and where, there was no judgement! I feel like the two universities are very different in what they offer, the courses people study and the types of backgrounds the students come from- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! What I did expect (frown upon me for my stereotypical attitude) was for the students to be very career-driven, headstrong and to have done plenty of research and be very sure of what they wanted to do in life.

I was very surprised to find out that most students had no idea what career path they wanted to follow, what opportunities were available to them and what they wanted to do after university.

I would say I have known roughly what career path I wanted to take for about 2 years now. I want to work in Marketing as it is my passion (hopefully you have gathered that by reading this blog) and something I seem to do well in (according to my exam results/coursework/ability to get a job in said field….).

However, this has not always been the case…

When I was doing my GCSE’s I had my heart set on a Journalism and French Degree, I loved English and I knew I wanted to do something creative that involved writing, I also enjoyed French and loved the idea of studying abroad for a year. When it came down to choosing my A-Level options I went for English and Photography for the Journalism aspect, French and Drama (just because I had no idea what else to choose).

Then I decided to visit Sheffield University on an Open Day as I really wanted to go there and I saw they had a Journalism and French Degree course. I liked the University and decided to go to a talk on Journalism… I am so glad I attended that talk, it was one of the biggest eye openers I have ever experienced in my life.

The lecturer explained that if I wanted to apply for the cause then I had to be 100% committed to Journalism and I had to work extremely hard in a competitive job market, where graduates usually start on a salary of £10,000 if that. He said it was extremely hard to find a job in Journalism as it was, never mind one that pays well.

I decided that from that moment on, I had made the wrong choice and I didn’t want to go into Journalism. After my first year in A-Levels I failed French so that was languages out of the window too!

I do remember being stuck at this point and having to seriously consider what Degree I wanted to apply for as if I remember rightly you have to choose your degree discipline quite early in A2.

I knew it still had to be creative and to do with writing, as I was doing really well in English A-Level. I looked at Public Relations and thought that it was something I really found interesting and wasn’t too far from Journalism, but might be too specific.

Then I looked at where the jobs were at the time, and what percentage of each set of graduates from each course got a job in their chosen field after university. Marketing seemed to rank fairly highly and there were lots of Marketing Graduate jobs available when I did a search.

So, that was it! I risked everything and just went for Marketing, without doing an AWFUL lot of research I must admit. I feel like if you ponder over something for too long you might be put off the idea, I’m the kind of person to say yes and then stick to it, whatever the consequences might be.

I’m so lucky the risk paid off as I really do love Marketing and now I’m lucky enough to be working in it, I’m so glad I made the right choice. I was initially so worried, as I had never studied Business or anything similar, and when we arrived at uni a lot of people had done Business A-Level and therefore knew lots about the degree. I also squirmed when I saw the timetable and “Finance”, “Stats” and “Economics” were on the list. I had absolutely hated maths at school and I was certain after I left that I would never have to do it again.

Well Finance turned out to be my favourite module (Admittedly, economics was my worst) but what I’m trying to say is that you should CONSIDER THINGS YOU MAY NOT HAVE CONSIDERED BEFORE. Take a leap of faith in an uncertain direction!

So I would say the same applies after university, take risks, try new things and even if you aren’t sure what you want to, make sure you know what options are available to you.

Sorry about my life story!!
Steph