Written in front: I am an IT professional in software engineering, and I plan to take the road of product manager in the future. During the interview, many interviewers will also ask that software engineering is so technical that you should do research and development. How do you make products? In fact, I will ask myself why, but in the end, I choose two words to answer: like and appropriate. When I used to do outreach work at school, I often told my clients: you just need it, we just specialize. It's that simple.

Junior year, will face employment. Many teachers, classmates and relatives at home will ask, what will I do after graduation? I always say product manager at this time, but they will add, what does a product manager do?

Indeed, product manager is a new position, and the word comes from the west. In the Internet age, this term has become a hot topic in China, and words like "Everyone is a product manager" have also appeared. At the beginning, I told them that the product manager is a "translator" in the Internet field: translating users' needs to programmers. Later, in the process of slow contact, I found myself too one-sided. After reading many books and articles, I finally found a term "surrogate mother", which is still in place at present. Why do you say that? Because the core business of the product is to extract requirements from users /BOSS and then hand them over to technology for development. Finally, the product will go online and will be optimized after going online. In fact, the product manager turns the idea of real parents (users) into an operable product, absorbs nutrients from R&D, operation and market, and finally gives birth to a baby.

So what do product managers do on a daily basis? It can be roughly divided into three stages: before R&D (product definition in brain diagram, user research), during R&D (business modeling) and after R&D (online operation). The specific brain map is as follows:

As you can see, I spend a lot of time on demand research, which also reflects that most of the daily work of products (40%-50%) is also spent on mining demand, formulating demand and auditing demand, so it is very important for a product manager to have a good sense of smell and logical thinking.

But the product seems to understand some operations, because you have to deal with operations; Products seem to know something about technology, because you have to deal with technology; The product seems to understand some psychology, because you should properly analyze the inner thoughts of users; The product seems to understand some data analysis, because you have to analyze what you want from thousands of data; Products seem to know something about sales, and the products that your needs turn into must be used by users. The product seems to know something about design. After all, you have to communicate with the user interface ... in short, the product is not as simple as we thought. Come on, in case you become a man like Mr. Joe!

I hope to write this article to give some inspiration to the-1 year-old product people, and welcome everyone to criticize the axe.