Company Management Team
Clarify the product direction, boost employee confidence, and establish reasonable systems. The core lies in clearly defining what the product direction is and giving clear instructions to the product manager. Don’t just speak in empty words or clichés. Because if you do that, the direct issue will be that the products designed by the product manager will change frequently, no one will use them after release, etc.
Project Manager
- In project-oriented companies, a project manager’s work might involve more negotiation with clients. This requires a certain level of expertise in areas such as financial services or specific industry government projects. It also demands a focus on resource management—you’re primarily managing people (human resources) and controlling risks within the project. Both of these factors determine whether the project succeeds or fails. Human resource management must be clearly defined: what each person needs to accomplish every day or week should be reflected in the plan, and progress for everyone should be updated daily. Risk management involves having contingency plans. Anything uncertain carries risk, and because of that uncertainty, contingency plans are essential. For example, online data migration requires a contingency plan such as database backup.
- In product-oriented companies, a project manager’s core work remains resource management (not elaborated here). It also includes managing the relationships between iterative versions, particularly focusing on priority levels. This involves pre-assessing product requirements through cost analysis.
Product Manager
Design products, produce requirement documents, and create interaction diagrams. Interaction diagrams are the most visual representation of product ideas—how good a product manager’s requirements are largely depends on the completeness of these interaction diagrams. The definitiveness and logical integrity of requirement documents can’t realistically be expected to cover everything because no role can achieve that level of comprehensiveness. However, every use case must be clearly defined—don’t use ambiguous terminology even though it might give you room for flexibility. Any professional term should first be defined before being logically linked together to fulfill specific requirements.