Esayo

The Discipline of
Product Management
Phillip J. Windley, Ph.D.
Chief Information Officer
Office of the Governor
State of Utah
Product development is the process of designing, building,operating, and
maintaining a good or service
1
. Software and Internet companies use a product
development process to ensure that they are not just manufacturing a
technology, but creating aproduct that people will want to buy and continue to
use. To be sure, a base technology is at the heart of the product, but product
development ensures that the customer’s voice is not lost in therush to an
exciting technology. Product development adds things like pricing, marketing,
and customer support to the technology to create a complete product.
Without a product managementphilosophy and discipline, an IT organization
becomes focused on the technology instead of the customers and is often
organized along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer.Ultimately, an IT organization must serve its customers or it will go out of
business, either because the customers go away or because they complain to
executive management until theorganization is changed.
This paper discusses the product management discipline and how it can be
applied to creating a customer driven IT organization.
Product Development
Product development isperformed by a multi-disciplinary team whose goal is
building, operating, and maintaining the product. Team members may include
product managers, software developers, project managers, productoperations
engineers, customer support managers, software quality assurance engineers,
user interface design engineers, marketers, financial personnel, and graphic
artists.
The product managerserves as the leader of this cross functional team. While
the product manager does not necessarily function as the operational manager
for these people, she does lead, coordinate, and supervise...