So what exactly is a Product Manager?

I’ve been at TDX Group for six years this month. I know I look older, but that’s actually over half of my post-university working life. I’ve spent most of that time working within our Debt Sale business, focused mainly on the delivery of a service to our clients and becoming a subject matter expert on debt sale.

More recently, I started a project along with various internal teams on developing our new debt sale platform, VENDO. Then I got a chance for an internal move, into our Products department to formally take ownership of VENDO along with some of our Industry Solutions products. It’s a great opportunity: a chance to apply what I’ve learned over the last six years in a different way, whilst learning some new skills.

So having become a Product Manager, I thought I should be proactive and do some independent reading on product management practices. I started by looking online and Google took me to a website which was nice and clear, concise and talked about product management with a little venn diagram. It simply described a product manager as an intersection between Business, Technology and User Experience. It recommended a book which I duly bought and downloaded onto my Kindle.
I eagerly opened the book and scanned through the contents pages. 40 chapters spread over 220 pages. None of the chapters said ‘Summary’ or ‘Top three things you need to know’ or anything like that, so I put it down and thought I’d have a read later.

To appeal to someone like me, the book needs a nice summary; something to hook me in and help me to decide I want to read it. I guess it’s too late now that I’ve bought it but of course I won’t recommend it to anyone until I’ve read it and decided if it’s any good.

So I did learn one valuable lesson about Product Management from the book. You must think about your end user. I’m fairly sure I’m not unique in my desire for the five minute summary yet the author, editors and publisher failed to consider me when they created the product. They’ve missed out on appealing to a whole group of users.

I might get round to reading the book at some point. Thankfully I have a team of experienced colleagues around me who can help me learn more about good product management. But I certainly know that a good product needs to meet the needs of a range of users and that should be central to its design.

By Andy Taylor, Product Manager - Debt Sale, TDX Group