Who is a product manager?
The rise of the tribe of product managers (PM) is a recent phenomenon. There were no PMs in the old organisations like say L&T, Dabur or HUL, though there could be people doing a similar job. The explosion of internet based solutions to people’s problems has given rise to a PM. If we want to understand who a PM is, we have to examine exactly what happened in the internet revolution that enabled a PM to set up shop. Internet Revolution The internet revolution was an information revolution. The internet made a lot of information available at the fingertips of the human being - data about weather, flight schedules, stock market, football scores etc. With internet availability becoming cheaper and the speeds becoming faster, the number of people accessing the internet increased substantially. Businesses soon realised that the internet is a huge new lever to prop their businesses up to newer heights. Why? Because the key part of most business transactions is consumption of in...