What we learnt about product management in Silicon Valley

The Valley blog series is written by husband and wife co-founders, Patrick and Alexandria Gentry, to chronicle their experiences in The Bay Area while on a four-month accelerator program.

Photo credit: Waag Society

I started my career in the media, where I wore many hats as the small company grew. During my time there, I managed magazine and print products, and learned the end-to-end processes around developing and selling a product.

Fast forward to the founding of Sprout Solutions, which I run together with my husband Patrick Gentry, and I find myself once again wearing many different hats and moving from role to role.

I was “product owner” (we run an Agile shop), but I quickly realized that my job was really more than just conveying the product vision to the scrum team. I found myself involved with design, development, and also with marketing and sales.

Product management 101 

Over our first few office hours in Acceleprise, it became apparent that what I was doing was called product management in this side of the world.

I had naturally fallen into this role without really knowing the terminology for the discipline, or the exact scope that it covers.

The term ‘product management’ is definitely not new (unlike ‘user experience’ or ‘customer success’ that the software industry has given birth to). The role was originally created as a brand management position, and was popularized by Neil McElroy of Proctor & Gamble (P&G).

Not surprisingly, one of the first tech companies to seriously apply product management principles to software was Intuit founder, Scott Cook, who was a former product manager (PM) at P&G.

But what exactly is a software product manager?

I took an Intro to Product Management course at General Assembly, and they have a great way of summarizing project management activities as:

• What to make: guiding the company to produce the right product for the right people by collaborating with prospective clients, current customers, and the sales, marketing, design and development teams.
• How to bring it to market: creating the strategies for promoting, selling, and supporting the product by collaborating with marketing, sales and customer success.
• How it succeeds: managing and monitoring the usage, growth and economics of the product by collaborating with finance, data science and others.

So, the PM role literally sits in this cross section:

From trends to best practices