Why is product manager important to a project?

Background

As a project manager I see all to often what I like to recognize as human nature - our drift to start projects, kick off ideas and just try something out. This is often a very commitment-free stage even in large projects, when ideas and upsides, win-wins take turns. 

From this point we all to often just kick off the project and start planning, implement, buy what we need to get it done. But will it cut it when it comes to major investments? 

A project is defined to have an end, when it will deliver a "product". The product will then live on and make money, bring joy or what the intention was from the start. If the project means major investments  - can we afford kick off, run, release and once something is ready kick back or start with something new?

Yes, a project manager will say since it is a kick-as product. But, the product owner must be equally committed. It is, again, the product that will generate revenue how the product will be used, maintained, supported etc and by who *must* be handled with as much enthusiasm as the project it self.

With this post, I want put focus on this and hope, if you work with product development, understands and put some extra thoughts to this and maybe it can save some nuisances down the line.

There are two major pits you can fall into and it is common that you do.

1. During development of the product, i.e. the initial project. Here it is so easy having only a project manager driving the project deliverable and business decisions, product plans etc are shared between either the project manager or managers that are stakeholders to the project. The lack of not having a dedicated product manager that understand and is very committed to the business of the end product will make the ownership of the product be vague/divided and often ends up at very high management resulting in rather long turnarounds of decisions and other actions needed.

2. Product life cycle vs project life cycle. Those cycles are very different, putting product management tasks on a project manager will make this obvious. A project managers main deliverable is to deliver a product, there will be optimizations and mitigation's made to reach this deliverable - all those optimizations need to objectively consider by a stakeholder with product life cycle in mind. If an optimization is made to save $/time early, it can very well cost much more down the line when thousand/millions of the product have reached the market.

The role for avoiding above pits is the product manager, it is mentioned in many processes but is not as often used. Without the role you will have a leak in the continuous development loop and the product (which should pay your salaries) is once release from the project left on its own. A product managers work will at this stage continue since she has been involved on all decisions that have impacted the business during the project and will now ensure maximal lifetime payback. Decisions made in favor of releasing product quickly will show if it was worth it, marketing efforts will hopefully pay off and product update plan should be more or less settled. A product update plan will in many cases require new project(s), in some cases it will be handled by the same resources who made the initial release but in some cases much or all of the staff is replaced if so, the product background is only with the product manager. The update plan is also made with the pay back in mind, meaning a costly feature release should be weighed towards a cheaper quality release, will the added features increase the sales or is it more important to handle flaws to reduce returns.