Odds are you have heard the term "product manager" being mentioned more and more lately. This isn't just hearsay, according to Google Trends, interest in the term has doubled over the last 5 years.

With that said, you are curious and you want the answer to 2 questions:

1. Does product management provide a return-on-investment for you?
2. How does product management fit into your organization?

The first question can be answered right now: according to 280Group, a fully optimized product manager can increase company profits by 34.2% on average. This article is going to answer the second question more thoroughly: how is product management critical to your startup success. After reading this article, you can see how and even if product management is a good fit for your startup right now. There is one more thing that I need to let you know. The average annual salary of a Product Manager globally is around $70,000 USD - with the United States ranking #1 in $110,000 and India ranking dead last with $25,000 USD. If that sounds expensive for you, you can rest assured that that you don't have to hire an in-house Product Manager right away if you don't have the accessible funds right now.

You can use available avenues such as a product manager consulting service so you can build your product more quickly and generate more traction quickly in a more cost-effective manner.

Reason #1: You Need Someone to be an Advocate for Your Customer

The first reason to understanding how product management is critical to your startup success is that you need someone to be a direct advocate for your customer - at all times.

Everyone on your team has something that they care about (sadly) more than your customers. For example:

• Developers care about strictly developing their code as they can release a new feature - like an artist who just made something worthwhile;
• growth marketers strictly care about growing the total number of users so they can brag about their new growth marketing framework;
• and you care about how far you can take your startup.

Who has the customer's best interests at heart - at all times? Enter in your Product Manager.

They are the professionals who stop you from making tragic decisions that could spike up:

• your churn rates (if you are in SaaS) or
• your cart abandonment rates (if you are building an eCommerce marketplace)
• your total number of inactive accounts (if you are building a social media platform).

Your Product Manager is the team member who stands in the way of:

• Needlessly adding new features that can hamper user experience overall, possibly hurting your startup's fine-tuned onboarding process.
• Pasting a referral growth loop that isn't ingrained or even aligned to your customer experience - so getting more end-users to use your product becomes a chore and strains the personal relationship with your end-users with their friends
• or not adding new potential growth opportunities for your startup - so you can escape the "valley of death" when you start to experience initial traction for your startup.

Your Product Manager is your professional who is there to ensure that you create products that your customers will continue to love.

Reason #2: You Don't Fully Understand Your Customer (Anymore)

When you first build your product, you have validated your product to your end-users.

In the beginning, you understand why you built your first initial product for your end-users.

Startup life was simpler but as your startup begins to grow bigger, there are concerns outside of being a great product that your end-users will love:

• You have stricter competition within your market.
• You have to protect user data more stringently.
• You have to decrease your churn rates or your total cart abandonment rates.
• You have to make sure that you have a stable tech stack so your startup can reliably run unhampered.
• You have to leverage 3rd-party applications to maintain a constant growth rate.

It may seem that you are still working on your product, your concerns are now far removed from your customers' perspective. Your customer just wants to know if your product works overall. As your to-do list becomes larger (and if you are not careful, disconnected) from your customer or your user base, you need someone whose main purpose is to stay connected with your customer.

One problem in the tech industry is that:

• you find yourself building features that your customer mentions that they want,
• you build the new feature
• you see a small uptick in growth and it falls.
• you decided that you just need to build a new feature
• and so, you begin the Product Feature Loop of Death, as Brian Balfour states it.

How do you know which product to build and which ones to avoid? With a product manager consulting service by your side, you can understand your end customer better and prioritize overall better decisions for your organization more clearly.

Reason #3: You Need a Dedicated North Star Metric to Fast-Track Decision-Making

Speaking about making better decisions faster, by hiring a product manager consulting service, you can make better decisions with the understanding of where your company is heading long-term. For example, your main "North Star" OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is to grow the Total # of Users but your Product Manager should be the one to intervene on behalf of your customer. Without having a qualified Project Manager on your team, your OKR can be:

• "Grow the Total # of Active Users" - no matter what (though this wouldn't be explicit but rather implicit).
• A common scenario of something like this happening would be: "yes, this could be a problem and it could hamper the customer experience overall but we'll fix it later"
• .....and it never gets fixed.

Unless they are a true sadist, no one plans to be purposely planning to hamper or lessen the quality of their customer experience from the start. However, one small decision after another leads to that outcome. In the best-case scenario: despite lessening the quality of the customer/user experience, you have a product that people use but you now have a fatal flaw.

Your startup is vulnerable to another company with a better UX and better customer experience to poach your customers away. You are doubly in trouble if your competitor has an evangelized user base that actively supports them and not you. Having a Product Manager within your ranks makes sure that you are always considering what your customer wants while planning and achieving your OKR. In essence, your product management consulting service is there to protect yourself from you making short-term decisions that don't benefit you in the long term.

Reason #4: You Don't Know If You Should Pivot or Not

The last reason how product management is critical to your startup success is that you need to know when to pivot. Outright, you can easily state that the best time for you to pivot is when you don't have customers. However, this is only touching the top part of the iceberg.

There are situations where you built a great product that everyone loves but you realize that the market that you are in is too small, the sales cycle is too long, and you are just a commodity with nothing different about your company. Knowing when to leave a market - or pivot - is about the skill to have: it allows you to leave bad situations more aptly.

There is something "honorable" about staying in a market no matter what and never giving up: this isn't about honor more so than it's about metrics with that very said, you must pay attention to the more important metrics that tell you to pivot.

Having a product management consulting service by your side means that you can actively understand your metrics directly and conclude (logically) whether to keep going or find another avenue to pursue your startup.

Recap

Let's recap so far. Having a dedicated product management professional helps you:

• make better decisions with your customers or end-users in mind.
• delegate customer understanding and customer relationships by having a dedicated product management professional focus on working directly with your end customer.
• fast-tracks your decision-making by having an overall OKR and KPIs to guide your decisions - without lessening the quality of your customers' relationship.
• and finally, help you decide on when you should pivot your company - even if every end-user is in love with it.

After all, Product Managers are great strategists and they favor business acumen. Yes, your product management professional helps you meet release dates and they communicate with your team. However, understanding the true value of your Product Manager allows you to see when they can be most helpful: successfully managing your product to create favorable situations for your startup while avoiding pitfalls that you don't accurately see. If you are unsure if using a Project Manager would be helpful, I recommend that you book a free, no-obligation session.

I can discuss more in detail here if project management is the right course of action for you, your team, and your organization.