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Yes, a good product manager should be someone in Marketing who is equally skilled and happy at talking large, meaningless phrases to the large, meaningless people who control the money, and nitty-gritty technical details with the rest of us, the ones who are going to build the thing.
It's up to us, the techy folks, to help the product manager find out whether what he's selling is what he believes it is and to help with ajdustments one way or the other.
In my fever dreams the product manager has come in from tech writing and knows how to enlist tech-writing help early on, to develop a good and marketable product within the first-to-market timeframe that's always too short.
Take the job, go and do it right, and don't forget the tech writers waiting to help you.
>
> From: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
> Date: 2007/02/18 Sun AM 11:52:56 EST
> To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>,
> "Kelley Greenman" <writinglists -at- inkworkswell -dot- com>
> Subject: Re: Technology Product Managers (was Re: Writing test Fridays)
>
> Titles can often be meaningless, but most often a "product
> manager" is a member of a company's marketing group who
> understands the company's target market and either divines
> whether a proposed product will sufficiently meet market
> needs to be in demand or proposes products that will be, then
> leads the effort to recruit early adopters and alpha or beta
> customers who will provide input as the product develops
> and works with project management to prevent the developers
> from going off on tangents that will cause the project to
> morph into something that doesn't have a market.
>
> Gene Kim-Eng
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kelley Greenman" <writinglists -at- inkworkswell -dot- com>
> > It all makes sense, to me, but I'm naive as to the ways of large,
> > bureaucratic organizations, far more familiar with the 'wear many hats'
> > environments of small companies. I was looking for a reality check. Is the
> > position title just glorified "project manager"? Perhaps those of you
> > who've experienced such managers directly would know?
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