Product Management Importance
Question: "Am I doing the right thing by studying design, UX, UI, management styles, etc. to improve my skills in product management?"
Answer: The skillset to become a professional product manager require developing an analytical research aptitude and superb linguistics capabilities. Studying design, UX, UI, management styles is helpful to become a program manager, and a computer science degree is supportive of being a product architect – but this is all unrelated to product management.
Question:"Aren't you over-rating the importance of product management?"
Answer: The importance of product management is not being over-rated. Product management is the starting point and arguably the most critical component of product delivery. Without true product management activities the company's products are a mere speculation.
Question:"Isn't the PM function performed in a company anyway, even if it's not called product management?"
Answer: Yes, this is true. In practice, whether officially or unofficially, product management is introduced and applied in a company from its outset. However, it is usually done haphazardly by employees whose main focus is some other activity. To properly apply product management to product operations the company needs dedicated professionals who work according to a prescribed methodology.
Question:"Are there other ways in which customers are affected – whether directly or indirectly – from maintaining the present situation of product management, besides products which are not always optimized to provide the best solution to their market problem?"
Answer: Not really. The customers are primarily adversely affected by not getting a good solution to their market problem.