What does a product manager do and why is it important?
Business in the limited Data World:
If you look at the course offering of most traditional universities, you will lucky to find one or two classes on product management from the 100s of courses offered. However, if you go to almost any local technology company, you will find product management as a core part of the business. This is because the product management is quite frankly a pretty new thing. In fact, it wasn't until the advent of the internet that the need for product management really began to intensify.
Generally speaking, in the pre-internet world companies had marketing people and engineers. The marketers would create general outlines of what customers wanted and then they would hand things off to engineering. Engineering would come back with a finished product that would then ship to customers. In the pre-internet world, many products were functional. They got the job done, but they didn't necessarily delight customers, but since the information was scarce and switching over to another product was costly, most consumers stuck with what they had. For a consumer, the primary source of data was the marketer and word of mouth.
However, in the internet world, data is not scarce and it is now really easy to get lots of information from multiple sources on product quality before we make a purchase decision. This means that for a product to survive in the competitive date plentiful market, your product actually has to be good!
The way Jeff Bezos puts it:
"In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts,"
