“Product management is nothing more than making sure that we work on the right things, meaning functionality that delivers value to the customer. … What AI is doing for us is that now we run very fast, but nobody's telling us where we are running. That is the reason why people are rightly obsessed about the product management and the product mindset within technical people in this era.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host opened the interview by asking what product management is. Marian defines it as working on the right things and says AI coding makes that skill more important for engineers, not less.
…you mentioned the EOC community that we are running here in the heart of Europe from Prague, Czech Republic, because these days we have more than 3,000 members and we are exactly helping people and engineering managers, AI Software Engineers to be highly valued on the market. So that's what we do.
Okay, great. So we'll start the podcast with some definitions. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what is product management?
Well, if I may distill it to a quite short narrative, to me, product management is nothing more than making sure that we work on the right things, meaning functionality that delivers value to the customer. By the customer, I mean not necessarily an external final customer, could be, for example, an internal customer for the platform teams. That's something what I see is forgotten very often. And it all comes down basically to putting our bets in the most meaningful manner, meaning impact effort, business alignment, and ensuring that our investment goes very well. And it is crucial to understand the principles of the product management these days because what AI is doing for us is that now we run very fast, but nobody's telling us where we are running. That is the reason why people are rightly obsessed about the product management and the product mindset within technical people in this era.
So how would you describe the difference between what you said, solving a customer problem that matters and solving a technical problem that also may eventually address a customer problem?
Well, it's funny that you say it. I used to be a VP of platform as well, managing up to a dozen of platform teams. And basically what we've done is that we were saying we want to productize the platform teams as well. What it means, in other words, is that answering to your question, I don't see…
So let me ask you this question. How would you describe the difference between solving a technical problem well and solving a customer problem that matters?