My team’s big whiteboarding sesh for UCRE a few semesters ago. HCI classes teach us how to bring several perspectives and goals into one idea, which is exactly what a PM needs to be able to do!

As we head into recruiting season, it is sometimes difficult to even understand what a role posted on LinkedIn means. One of these more elusive job titles is a Product Manager.

Product Management 101

Any digital product needs designers to create it visually and engineers to write and maintain its code. But a product also needs someone to be responsible for its current impact and future direction at a higher level. That’s where a Product Manager comes in. A PM is the primary advocate for a given product. We are responsible for defining the direction we need to head in next to continue improving; this can look like outlining small iterations, such as rewriting unclear copy, or taking a big swing with a new feature. The PM bookends the product iteration process:

• Start (heavy lift): decide the team’s highest priority improvement to the product, define the idea clearly, and convince the higher-ups that it is a change we should make.
• Middle (management): ensure that all functions are on track to implement the idea as intended and handle any hiccups that come up along the way.
• End (heavy lift): analyze the feature’s key metrics to decide if we should launch or shut the feature down and start thinking of next steps to continue improving.

A PM will be juggling several different iterations at once, each at a different point in the process. You could be writing a spec for one idea, answering the engineers’ questions as they implement a second, and analyzing a third for launch.

What does HCI have to do with PM?

You can’t spell HCI without interdisciplinary. Okay maybe you can, but you definitely can’t do anything in HCI without being strong at balancing several different fields at once. HCI is all about taking advantage of the intersection of CS, design, psychology, business, and so on. That’s what we are good at!

This mindset transfers directly to product management because PMs have to constantly balance the design, engineering, and business perspectives of a product. Any HCI project at CMU forces us to consider the user experience and needs, the capabilities of our technology, and how our idea fits in with the rest of the industry. We thrive in that ambiguous space between the well-defined functions, which is exactly where a PM needs to work best.

Hungry for more?

If product management sounds a bit more interesting now, or if you have more questions, a good place to start is by digging into the descriptions of current roles and seeing what sparks excitement!