Facilitating Collaboration and Teamwork: The Major Responsibility of a Product Manager

According to Ignition, “A product manager plays a critical role in facilitating collaboration and ensuring smooth communication between teams. It's their job to bring together different departments, align goals and objectives, and ensure that everyone is working towards the same vision for a product.”

I saw this play out this week as an active participant of Terra Learning Bootcamp, Cohort 11.

The PM team was tasked with the responsibility of overseeing the development of a fully functional quiz app, ensuring it meets the specified requirements and design compliance with major focus on implementing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create an interactive and user-friendly application. Furthermore, the team was assigned the task of coordinating the design, development, and quality assurance teams, managing timelines, and ensure the project aligns with business objectives.

To make matters more interesting, there was no QA team, so we had to step in and do the work of QA testers, drawing up a test plan and testing the use cases.

The project was quite insightful, and I had the opportunity to learn as we had to collaborate closely with the dev and design teams (and other PM teams). So, yes, it was a big community.

To get started, our first task was to create a PRD. Since we had three PM teams, we had to assign tasks amongst the respective teams and my team was tasked with coming up of product overview, user persona, success metrics, competitive analysis, and a user flow.

With the contribution of every team member, we reached our goal and with the combined effort of all the PM teams, we were able to create a worthy product requirement app for Quizy.

Next up was sharing this document with the design team who was guided by the docs. Of course, the lead PM was overseeing the process, ensuring the design team were following the product features and specifications. The designs were then handed over to the front end and backend dev team who collaborated to bring the designs to life.

Before submission, the PM team, mine in particular worked on the test plan and launch plan documents and ensured all the specifications were met, and highlighting areas that needed to be further worked on.

In all, it was a tasking and learning experience and I’m glad I got to step into the shoes of a product manager, working with not just my fellow product managers but working with other product development teams.

Without a PM, I wonder how development process would have looked like. The role of product managers cannot be overemphasized, and I know I speak for every PM when I say, PMs are heroes in plain clothes, steering the ship and managing relationships with stakeholders and product development teams.