Design thinking is an integral part of product development and management. Design thinking focuses on the user's needs, aspirations, visions, concerns, frustrations, and feedback. It is a human-centered process that helps product managers to better understand user needs and wants. There's a fine line between the two, and the product managers must distinguish between the user needs and the user wants. They have to make sure all the user needs are met and pay just enough attention to user wants. Although product managers are mainly problem-solvers, they achieve it by carefully planning out their activities and tracking their work by building a data-based framework for optimal visualization to serve their audience.
What's the contribution of product managers?
Predicting user's thoughts
In any industry, you have to be on your toes, juggling tasks all day long. When you stop, the growth stops. Product managers must interact with users and get to know them before handling any projects. To work on the product, you have to know the user’s point of view. When you understand the user, you can predict their thoughts, visions, and sometimes even feedback. It gives a vision and direction to your goal instead of you just walking through the tasks blindly without proper planning.
Problem points
When you are developing a product, you have to deal with several issues. As a product manager, you have to attend to these issues to ensure the smooth presentation of the product to the user. Once you identify and jot down the problem points, you get a clear view of the problems faced by the user and can attempt to solve them. If your users are resorting to a different methodology, you must analyze why your users are using an alternative approach. Study that approach and propose something better to the users.
Prototyping
As a product manager, you have to be well aware of all the processes and up-to-date information on your project. Prototyping is a crucial part of the design thinking process. It is responsible for making a real-life product after months of research, discussions, and design.
Testing
Once you have a real-life prototype in your hand, you have to test it for all possible situations in varied circumstances to ensure it's the best one you offer to the user. If your product does better than the predetermined metrics and has a better-valued preposition over the alternative, you have a great product to present to the client. As a product manager, you have to be well versed in all the pros of the product and convince the clients why it's better than the alternative approach.
Being a product manager is not an easy job. You have to scrutinize each process minutely and keep up-to-date information about the product at all times. If the user enquires about the updates you should be able to give them accurate information and details. Without a product manager, the whole process would be a mess. A good product manager hones good organization as well as communication skills to effectively interact with the clients.
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