原文标题: Perspectives: On Product Management’s Saeed Khan Explains Why Most Growing Companies Misunderstand Product Management

A lot of startup and expansion-stage technology companies say they believe and invest in product management. 许多创业或成长期的技术性公司说他们相信并很乐意在产品管理上有投入。 So, they hire a couple of product managers to handle the tasks they believe fall into the product management bucket and have those new team members report to either the head of marketing or engineering.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly why a chasm exists between what most companies think product management is and what it should actually be, says Saeed Khan, a long time technology product manager and co-founder of the blog, On Product Management. A true product management function isn’t simply an extension of marketing or engineering, Khan explains. 一个真正意义上的产品管理功能不是简单的市场营销的延伸或工程， Khan解释说。Rather, it’s a separate strategic function that should be responsible for driving product focus, alignment, and market clarity.

“I think the name ‘product management’ is one of the barriers that prevents people from really understanding what it is and isn’t,” says Khan. “Product management is about so much more than the ‘product’ piece of it.”

Khan sat down with OpenView for a brief Q&A to discuss his definition of product management, how it should be staffed, and what growing companies should do to get the most out of their product management teams:

It seems that, even among experts, there are myriad definitions of product management. What’s your definition and is there really more than one way to describe it? 如此看来，即使一些专家，也对产品管理有很多不同的定义。那么你的参评管理定义如何且能给出某种意义上的描述呢？

There’s a big difference between different definitions and different understandings. Different definitions of product management are OK. Different understandings are not. Fundamentally, product management is a business optimization function that oversees technology and product all the way from development through to go-to-market. Areas such as channel development, marketing strategy and positioning, and customer management, are all part of overall product management.

If you look at consumer products, product managers aren’t responsible for the chemistry of the business’s products. They aren’t in the lab mixing ingredients and trying to tweak the recipe. Why should it be any different for technology companies? Sure, there’s a much closer relationship between bits, bytes and product management in software companies, but that doesn’t mean a product manager’s responsibilities should be any different. In the end, they have to focus on the success of the product. It’s just about requirements and what you should build? Other key questions include: How will that product compete? What can you do to take it to market? How should the product be priced and licensed? How will customers use your product?

Those are all components of the holistic definition of product management. If you’re not including them into product management, then all you’re doing is turning it into an adjunct of product engineering.

For companies looking to implement product management, what role should they hire first? 许多公司希望去开始执行产品管理，那么他们首先想要怎样一种职位角色呢？

I think the biggest mistake most growing companies make is hiring one or two junior product managers and thinking they’re getting more value by doing that. In reality, for the first hire, the best thing to do is hire a seasoned product management executive that can lead a new team and feel comfortable sitting at the table with the CEO and management team.

Ultimately, the head of product management is a leadership role. You need someone that not only understands how product management relates to overall business strategy, but also someone that can build and lead a team as the business scales. So, if you do hire an individual product manager first make sure you hire someone with the kind of seasoned experience that will allow them to own the function and bring credibility to it.

If, instead, you hire two junior product managers and they’re overwhelmed by the job or aren’t able to meet expectations, then everyone else in your organization will lose faith in them and product management as a whole. That creates a vicious cycle that makes it pretty difficult to legitimize product management.

After finding that perfect product management leader, who should be brought on next? 在找出一名好的产品管理主管后，谁又应该继续接下来的工作呢？

As the breadth of functionality increases, companies need to be sure they specialize within product management. If you think about the way growing sales and marketing teams are built, you don’t hire a bunch of generalists that are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. For example, you hire lead qualifiers, lead generators, sales reps, and sales managers — specialized roles that can focus on specific tasks. With product management, it’s no different.

So, after you’ve hired a head of product management and one or two quality product managers, the next hire should be a product marketing person that can work closely with the product managers. After that, you might hire a technical product manager — someone who can work more closely with engineering. Another hire could include a solutions specialist, who would be responsible for analyzing new use cases or scenarios that can be applied to the product road map. The idea is to create and fill roles that are all spokes in a very well rounded wheel.

Once that team is in place, how do you re-delegate responsibilities that used to be owned by sales, marketing, or engineering to product management, without rocking the boat? 一旦团队到位，如何委派人员承担销售、营销或产品管理工程责任，从而是整个系统不受到影响？

Honestly, it depends on your corporate culture.忠诚的，它要依靠于整个公司的文化。 Change is a process, not an event. So don’t expect to be able to take responsibility away from other departments overnight and experience a smooth transition. If you’ve got big picture people on your team who are able to put change into context, you might be able move quicker and the adjustment won’t be as dramatic. If you’ve got people who are more emotionally married to the product and your old product strategy, it might take some finesse.

When you begin to formalize product management, it’s critical to set clear expectations and responsibilities. A product manager’s job is to unemotionally align the product strategy and the business strategy, and you need to put them in a position to do that. But don’t be surprised if a founding software developer, for instance, resists change.

Here’s an example: I worked for a startup in the dotcom days that was looking to dramatically shift its product strategy. The CEO wanted to move away from a desktop product to a server-based product. From my point of view, it was a no-brainer. But there were people within the company who were really upset because they were emotionally invested in the desktop product. They were looking at years of work and thinking it’s going up in flames.

The lesson is that product management implementation isn’t always cut and dried. You have to factor in your company culture and size, and the personalities of the people that might be affected by it. Ultimately, you’re doing what’s best for the company, but you don’t want it to be such a disruptive change that rifts are created between Product Management and every other department.

作者介绍：

Saeed Khan is a self-proclaimed career product manager, having spent 15 years doing it formally and a number of years before that doing it informally. He’s worked with startups and public companies in Toronto and Silicon Valley, in roles ranging from individual contributor to Vice President of Product Management. He writes for On Product Management and Pragmatic Marketing, and in 2008 was a contributor to a book called “Software Product Management, Issues and Perspectives.” You can follow him on Twitter here.

翻译： 涉水轻舟
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