Product Discovery: The Product Manager’s Essential Job
In Korea, the role of the product manager has risen rapidly in visibility and demand. A quick look at major job platforms shows hundreds of openings. What was once a role concentrated in software companies is now essential across startups, manufacturing, and services.
Two forces explain why product managers are becoming so important in Korea.
First, customer needs have shifted. People no longer settle for products that are merely functional; they expect emotional value and thoughtful user experiences. Product managers identify these needs with precision and translate them into products that customers will choose and love.
Second, technology has raised the bar. Advances in areas like artificial intelligence and the internet of things make products more complex. Product managers must understand these technologies and know how to apply them to product development.
A brief history
Many trace the modern roots of the role to a 1930s memo by Neil McElroy at Procter and Gamble describing the “Brand Man.” His concept maps closely to today’s product manager. He wrote that the brand man should make decisions as close to the customer as possible and act as the customer’s voice inside the company. In practice that meant speaking directly with customers to uncover their problems, then building products that solved them, while also owning marketing, distribution, and sales strategy for the product.
I currently serve as a product manager at MOBA, and earlier worked as an assistant brand manager at The Hershey Company. Looking back, the roles share a great deal. Both are customer centered. You build products that solve customer problems, coordinate across many teams, communicate constantly, and after launch you watch reactions and improve the product.
프로덕트 매니저의 정의
How can we define the role more concretely? Marty Cagan, founder of SVPG and author of Inspired and Empowered, describes as below:
This can sound abstract, as if the PM owns everything. In truth, the PM does own the whole product. The job is to set a product vision aligned with business goals and to manage the entire journey required to realize it. After launch, the PM continues to monitor success through data analysis and user interviews and drives ongoing improvement. That ongoing stewardship is the work.
What a product manager does
The responsibilities are broad. You must understand customers, set product vision and strategy, coordinate across teams to launch, and make decisions along the way. You also take on the practical work that supports launch, such as analyzing data, forming and testing hypotheses, running research, and ensuring quality.
Product Discovery
At the core of the role is Product Discovery. Product Discovery is the process of deeply understanding customer problems and needs and then finding the best product solution to address them. It goes beyond proposing and building ideas. It centers on building the right product through conversation with customers, analysis of data, and deliberate experimentation.
You focus on the customer problem and search for solutions that truly solve it. You can run Product Discovery in the following stages.
- First, define the problem from the customer’s perspective. Use varied ways to talk with customers, gather their views, and surface the problems they face.
- Next, generate potential solutions. Ideate broadly on ways to address the problem.
- Then, create a prototype so you can visualize and test the solution.
- After that, test and iterate. Improve based on experiments and customer feedback.
- Finally, launch and manage the product with a commitment to continuous improvement.
The steps above are simple to list and hard to live. Marty Cagan often reminds us, “Product is hard.” Even so, we must stay obsessed with customer problems and build solutions. In my view, that obsession starts with meeting customers frequently and through many channels. Even as a product manager, join sales meetings, check voice of the customer with the CX manager every day, review user data, run user interviews yourself, and share what you learn with the team. The first button you fasten in Product Discovery is to understand and fixate on the customer’s problem.
Finding solutions then depends on trying many ideas and watching real reactions. Most ideas fail. That is why the practical path through Product Discovery is to design prototypes at a fast cadence, test them, and learn quickly from the results.