From a Business Analyst to a Product Manager
Being a business analyst is probably the easiest part of the product manager.
I did not start out as a product manager and the role evolved naturally.
When I started my role in the product team, the following questions kept coming back.
Why are we doing this product? Is there enough need out there and do we know what returns we would get?
Do we know who we are building for and what are we building?
While these are innocuous questions that can be posed to a business analyst working on any IT project, what differed was there were no one person or team we could pose these questions to to arrive at answers.
We could also not design workshops in case there were multiple stakeholders to arrive at these answers.
I ended up doing the following and slowly what I started doing defined the role that I had taken up.
I started doing market research to understand what are the market segments available for my product
Visiting retailers and trying to understand their pain points helped us understand what we should build and who we should build for
Carrying lo-fi and functional prototypes to demonstrate and receive feedback.
However I would soon find out that there was way more to the product manager role than what meets the eye.