The term “product manager” seems to have only caught on in recent years, although the position is said to have been created in 1927.
Many people have read Everyone is a Product Manager. In recent years, product manager is mainly a position in Internet companies. Doesn’t seem to be high on the contempt chain for jobs at Internet companies… The job of book editor at a publishing house, she thought, was a lot like product manager.
Product managers have a lot of characteristics, a lot of thinking characteristics, in my personal opinion, to understand the user’s thinking is the first important quality product managers should have. [User thinking]. (juejin. Cn/post / 695731…
Like product managers, book editors need to think about users — they need to do market research and understand their needs before they can even think about developing a product — and they need to organize and write a book.
Like product managers, book editors must have a sense of context — something that publishers in the past didn’t pay much attention to, as they discovered in the years when context became a buzzword. The scene is related to the character. Books you want to read when you relax in a coffee shop, books you want to read when you work in an office, books you want to read when you study at school, books you want to read before you go to bed, books you want to read as a parent… Will be different. Different roles, different scenes, different needs. So scenario thinking is also requirements analysis.
As well as product manager, book editor must have a sense of team, in a book from the selected topic to go on sale in the process to organize and coordinate the various team strength, including the author, editor, text editing, typesetting, fine arts editor, review of final appeal, publications, printing, binding, storage, marketing center, market operation…
Like product managers, book editors must research their own products and competing ones. For the product after the launch, the planning editor should pay attention to the sales data and user evaluation, so as to develop a better product.
As you can see, book editors are really product managers. However, due to the particularity of the relationship between the producer — the author and the editor, who is usually not an internal employee of the company but an external expert, and the editor’s ability to control and coordinate the product development process and effect is fundamentally determined, which is much weaker than that of the product manager in the general company. So editors often encounter random authors, and there’s not much they can do about it, because the author may not be in control. This is a huge challenge for product managers.
For a book, it is necessary to tie the author and editor together to form a product development team, acting as a critical and loving product manager, researching the needs of readers and developing products together, so as to produce a good work.
Writing a book, or writing an article, is creating a product. So, don’t forget the product thinking!
