What does a Product Manager role at Cisco look like?
Written by Dave Corley
Twenty years experience as lead product manager at 8 startups and 2 megacorps478 Views
I was a PdM at Cisco from 1998 through 2006. I was lead PdM for Cisco CallManager (Cisco’s software IP PBX) from 1996 (pre-Cisco) through mid-2004. Then product managed lots of Cisco/Linksys routers, switches, phones and software from 2004 through 2006.
Let me get something off my chest first… Contrary to views held by some, Cisco’s products must be interoperable. So, they must use standards-based protocols and data structures to interact with non-Cisco products. Customers demand that. None of the thousands of customers I dealt with would accept a Cisco product that could not interoperate with the non-Cisco products in their own infrastructure. That said, if a product was developed to deliver capabilities only described by standards, then the product would be below average. All good product and service vendors will go beyond the standards to deliver capabilities their customers require.
Now, to answer your question…. A technical product manager at Cisco (or any other telecom equipment vendor) is responsible for translating, categorizing and prioritizing individual customer needs into product requirements. Many times, customers will tell you what they “want”… the best technical product managers will be able to discern what the individual needs, then coagulate multiple similar needs into one or more product requirements… these requirements expressed in a way that the product engineers can understand and can scope the requirement. Technical product managers at Cisco live their lives in meetings… with customers, engineers, executives, account managers, sales engineers, customer support engineers, etc. Once they’ve assimilated a list of requirements for the product, they have to “sell” the concept, then help drive the accomplishment of the project to completion.
A marketing product manager is responsible for translating the existing capabilities of a product into messages that will optimize the profitability of the product over its lifetime. They’re responsible for the very large amount of customer/sales-facing material that describes their product and makes the case why their product is better than similar products built by other vendors.