WHAT DOES A DATA PRODUCT MANAGER DO?
Published: October 9, 2024 - The Data Product Manager optimizes data vendor relationships to maximize data investment returns and is responsible for the development and maintenance of a comprehensive data dictionary tailored for both internal and external users. This role involves collaborating closely with technology leadership to provide strategic consultation and ensure meticulous product delivery, while also developing product specifications focused on data analytics and modeling to improve data screening and scoring processes. Additionally, the manager participates in technology decisions, collaborates across departments to align product features with the roadmap, and engages with executives and customers to refine the company’s data strategy and product offerings.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Data Product Manager
1. Data Product Manager Duties
- Development Prioritization: Set development priorities and evolve the product roadmap for tick history.
- Requirements Management: Create requirement specifications for engineering teams and manage the product backlog.
- Process Improvement: Identify and drive process improvements in the onboarding process from pre-sales to post-sales, including coverage checks, client trials, provisioning, and support handoffs.
- Proof-of-Concept Execution: Define and execute proof-of-concepts to validate new product ideas.
- Go-to-Market Collaboration: Liaise with Sales and Marketing teams on go-to-market strategies.
- Collaterals Creation: Create internal and external-facing product collaterals, training materials, product specifications, and user guides.
- Client Support Escalation: Serve as an escalation point for client support teams on complex issues.
- Data Centralization: Centralize acquired data with a robust pipeline and clear structure embedded with a MECE tag system as infrastructure to empower data reusability.
- Tool Design and Delivery: Design and deliver tools to modularize data acquisition and application processes to be compatible with different business requests and improve overall data excellence.
- Team Leadership: Lead a fast-paced, international, and cross-functional product team.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Work collaboratively with countries, regions, and business lines
2. Data Product Manager Details
- Strategy Leadership: Lead strategy and execution of the team's roadmap with the goal of scaling our data products to be more accessible, reliable, and impactful for all employees at the firm and our clients directly.
- Agile Management: Run agile ceremonies including stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives in a co-leadership role with the senior technologist lead.
- Documentation Production: Produce materials used for quarterly planning, executive roadmap updates, and product requirement documents.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Iteratively gather stakeholder requirements and user feedback for creating and prioritizing epics and story-level tickets using Asana.
- Product Lifecycle Management: Lead the full product lifecycle for designated product areas, including research, scoping, prototyping, validation, productizing, and rollout.
- Blocker and Risk Management: Manage blockers, dependencies, and risk factors across cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
- End-to-End Delivery Ownership: Own end-to-end product delivery, including marketing, training, documentation, and mediating expectations of users and stakeholders.
- KPI Measurement: Measure product and operational KPIs, such as user engagement metrics, and supply regular updates to stakeholders and users.
- Value Driver Understanding: Understand the key value drivers for product areas and show progress against success metrics to ensure our products are delivering value as expected.
- Technical Insight Maintenance: Maintain a high-level understanding of the underlying technical components in the product portfolio to help design and prioritize solutions with team members on where key issues or risks may exist.
3. Data Product Manager Responsibilities
- Product Lifecycle Management: Lead product across its lifecycle—shepherding it from strategy to planning, development, launch, and beyond.
- Decision Accountability: Accountable for decision-making on what gets built and guide how it gets built and launched.
- Market Understanding: Develop a deep understanding of market data models, internal data sources, partner ecosystems, and competitive strategies.
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Act as the "glue" that binds all functions that touch the product from strategy, engineering, design, sales, and marketing to operations, finance, and legal.
- Product Governance: Run rigid product governance, take trade-off decisions, bring together cross-functional teams, gain alignment between diverse functions, and act as a company-wide evangelist.
- Cost Management: Balance product features or customization against costs and take action to keep the process on track.
- Vision and Requirements: Move fluidly from long-term coordination and vision-setting to detailed functional requirements.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Take an external role to collect, test, and verify product capabilities with internal and external stakeholders.
- Planning Cycle Management: Manage a two-speed planning cycle with weekly/monthly gates and milestones of sprints and releases while working against a 24-month product roadmap.
- Performance Measurement: Measure progress and performance by the product scorecard, which tracks KPIs on product delivery (time, budget, quality) and end-user performance (adoption, engagement, and monetization).
- Release Management: Manage regular releases and support our QA teams on UAT where necessary.
- Team Collaboration: Work with other teams in the company (e.g., Technology, Data, Operations, Sales, Marketing) to achieve the objectives above.
4. Data Product Manager Job Summary
- Vendor Management: Assist in managing our data vendors to yield the best return on our data investment.
- Data Taxonomy: Understand data taxonomy and how to write/organize a data dictionary for internal and external users.
- Technology Consultation: Provide consultation directly to technology leadership.
- Product Delivery Assurance: Ensure faithful product delivery, with significant responsibility to ensure that we are getting the best possible results for product investment.
- Product Requirements Development: Develop specific product requirements with a focus on data, analytics, and modeling logic to enhance the screening and scoring of data.
- Technical Collaboration: Participate in technology/solution decisions with architecture and product teams for projects, including ensuring that technical design, unit testing, deployment, and implementation requirements are properly documented.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Collaborate with Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Product Development to evaluate and prioritize product features for inclusion in the product roadmap.
- Data Strategy Shaping: Interface with PI Executives to help shape the company’s data strategy.
- Customer Feedback Support: Support customer service and professional services to answer questions and gather customer feedback, which shapes product development.
- Market Research: Conduct market research and competitor research to stay aware of important trends in the market that inform product strategy.
- Client Needs Analysis: Analyze the needs of our clients through user research, stakeholder collaboration, and analysis of data
5. Data Product Manager Accountabilities
- Feature Design Collaboration: Work with team members to raise any issues with feature design and collaborate on confirming correct acceptance criteria are delivered against features.
- Business Value Evaluation: Know how to evaluate and objectively prioritize business value.
- Product Vision Development: Help drive forward the overall product vision by assisting in the development and adaptation of product strategy.
- Stakeholder Relationship Building: Build relationships with business stakeholders, influence the decision-making process, and ensure effective collaboration between all business areas around the integration product strategy.
- Feature Prioritization: Support the development and prioritization of features to meet client needs and drive customer acquisition and retention.
- User Story Formulation: Formulate user stories and detailed business requirements while evaluating their potential and practicality.
- Development Process Coordination: Plan and coordinate all moving pieces of our product development process (grooming, prioritization, and refinement), working day-to-day with the engineering team to ensure proper execution of user stories through user acceptance testing.
- Release Coordination: Work with the engineering team to identify clearly defined releases based on the backlog, coordinate planning meetings, and run grooming meetings.
- Client Experience Enhancement: Enhance client experience by deriving deep (quantitative and qualitative) product insights utilizing usage metrics for new and existing product features.
- Sales and Marketing Support: Work with the Sales and Marketing team to support communication around our value proposition and positioning of all products across different geographies and verticals.