Frequently, I am conflicted when I’m asked, Are you doing PM stuff? Are you a PM?; and What is a PM?

What is a PM

According to Wikipedia, Product Management “is an organizational function within a company dealing with new product development, business justification, planning, verification, forecasting, pricing, product launch, and marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle”.

Wikipedia further defines a Product Manager as a “professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product (both physical and digital products), specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features”.

Are you doing PM stuff? Are you a PM?

Taking into consideration the above definitions, then i think i may consider myself as somewhat a project manager who has done a couple of PM stuff. Wait, did I say “somewhat”? Hmmm, let me rephrase, taking the definitions above plus reading SHERIF MANSOUR article, I am a PM and, I am doing PM stuff.

In the last year plus some months, I happen to be doing PM stuff by chance. By chance, I mean; I was not ready, did not know all, plus I was not a fan of writing (Note PM job involves 80% documentation and writing, and trust me you should be good at it!) and I was the last man standing in the department.

Types of PM?

Reading this article, Jonathan Golden mentions there are three types of PMs;

  • Pioneers - These are PMs who are excited to build prototypes and are mostly entrepreneurs and founders. They are risk-takers and always want to create something new.

  • Settlers - These are PMs who focus on impact. They care about reaching lots of people - growth, plus they’re obsessed with optimizing. Settlers PMs are highly analytical, driven by metrics, work in hand with data science teams.

  • Town Planners - These are PMs that are platform managers. They lead when it’s time to build an infrastructure or systems to handle scale and accommodate the product’s use case for now and in the futures.

Which Type of PM am I?

I somehow believe no PM is 100% in all the types above; however, I might be wrong as I have read about some PM who started as Settlers, become Town Planners and Build product from the ground up. For me, I’m not special and, from what I have done and what I continue to do in and outside my current organization, I would say I am:

  • 50% Settler - I helped build and designed a USSD application that optimizes our lead conversion process and customer repayment processes. This USSD application helped influence how leads convert to applicants compared to the old method used. Further, it also influenced how users make payment when their loans are due.

  • 45% Town Planner - From the start, I joined my current organization; growth was the focus and, my role was to identify systems that were preventing us from achieving targets. In the process of discovering, I developed and built metrics to measure all third-party systems, which played a critical role and led migrations that replaced certain providers that were not functioning per our threshold. After, I built backup mechanisms for some systems, improved and introduced some new platforms that could do some jobs and even reduce cost in some process. In this process, our team discovered USSD and, I extended it to repayments.

  • 5% Pioneer - I failed to build Occupy as I made some steps and, I learnt some lessons in the process. But trust me, I will revisit it soon and make it plus other ideas in my head work. I know I would be a builder and risk-taker soon and am looking forward to that day.

Thanks for reading my article, and I hope you enjoyed it and also discover yourself.

I am Frederick Emile Bondzie-Arthur, a Business and Systems Analyst and Product and Information Technology lead at Fido MicroCredit Limited. Aside PM stuff, I have skills in backed dev (Python: Django Rest Framework and FastAPI, Learning Go), Machine Learning and Deep Learning. You can find my work at github

Reference

Produt Management - Wikipedia

Product Manager - Wikipedia

Product Manager - Atlassian

The power of elastic product team - Airbnb