Of Creams and Dreams ...

One of my favorite quotes is by Charles Revson, founder of Revlon Cosmetics - "In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope".

.. very relevant for the product manager role. Depending on the audience you are addressing to, you as a product manager need to communicate at the right level. To the customers and prospects, you are selling the benefits of your product and your company’s brand with the emphasis on how the product helps them solve real world problems. Although in some cases and for some audience (e.g., technical folks in the customer’s organization evaluating your product), you might be required to get into the details of how your product is built (e.g., review the architecture of the product to determine compliance with technical standards in the customer environment), for the most part you want to stick with talking about the benefits of your product and get the customer/prospect excited about how she is going to get the solution to the business problem by using your product. You really need to hammer home the points about customer advantage with your product and why the customer should buy from you.

On the other hand, when you are talking to engineering about making the product vision a reality, you will need the ability to drill down into the technical aspects of the product – the intricate details of how the nuts and bolts of the product are going to fit together (e.g., how the APIs need to be properly defined for a third party partner or a customer to use it effectively). You want to make sure that you talk the talk while walking the floors of the factory.

This ability to communicate effectively both at the big picture as well as the detailed level is extremely important for a product manager. In a way, this is a critical ability for any profession that requires good communication skills. In the product management role, however, you really need to master this skill because of the wide range of stakeholders you interact with. During the course of a day, you might need to do this “context switching” multiple times depending on who your stakeholders are.

A highly effective product manager masters the art of being able to talk about product benefits in the context of real world use cases as effectively as he is able to dive into the details of the features or technical underpinnings of the product.