Alyssa Dver’s book, “Software Product Management Essentials” has sold over 10,000 copies worldwide. She is regularly interviewed as a product management and marketing expert and has been published in Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Entrepreneur.

Building software requires smart people, so these intelligent individuals often believe that they know it all and can do it all. Perhaps a select few are able. However, the vast majority of technical and financial geniuses don’t appreciate the workload and skill set required to manage a product effectively.

A Product Manager (PM) is a like an agent. He/she is always looking out for the product’s well being. He/she evaluates the competitive landscape, understands the going rates (prices), and helps to position and present the product to the best possible target audiences.

Meanwhile, the company founder, who acts more like a product’s parent, can be blind or in denial about their own creation. As such, the PM often must protect the product from its own parental misjudgments and in large companies, sometimes even from its own siblings (other internal projects that compete).

The company founder, who acts more like a product’s parent, can be blind or in denial about their own creation

So, if the PM is experienced, he/she knows that their main responsibility is to stay rational, data-supported and open minded. In addition to the founder, the PM will also get strong opinions from Engineering , Tech Support, Documentation, and hopefully many others in the company. They combine this information with ongoing dialogue with customers, prospects, industry analysts and reporters. They review secondary research and competitive marketing material.

There is a perpetual feed of information that gets blended together to guide the PM in making and defending product decisions. These decisions will include requirements prioritization, pricing, positioning/messaging, and many other such make or break considerations.

A Product Manager’s job is never really done because there is always new information to find. There are new marketing toys to learn – webcasting, podcasting, blogs, mashups and more. There are new research techniques – web surveys, predictive analytics, online focus groups, etc. New methods of analysis to employ – use cases, personas, Balanced Scorecard, etc. And there are always new personalities within the organization which must be understood and integrated.

If there is one thing a PM is always challenged with, it is coordinating cross-functional projects and opinions.

In the end, the PM has a specific goal: deliver a quality product, on-time. This means, the product must have the required feature set, be built so it works and does so at a price and time frame that enough people will buy. This is not easy to say or to do. What makes it even harder is that PMs don’t usually have budgets or staff.

They operate as ringleaders to help all the performers do their best to stay safe and look good. And yes, sometimes the PM even gets to clean up after the elephants because in the end, it is the PM who will be associated with a successful product (or not).

So in essence, product management is important to any sized software organization for the following reasons:

1. Without it, there is a biased, naïve perspective. This can easily lead to building the wrong product or having the wrong positioning or pricing. All too obviously, this makes it impossible to sell.

2. PMs help everyone else in the organization to be more productive. They offload work from the CEO down to individual engineers. PMs do this by ensuring all stakeholders are getting the information and support needed to do their jobs. Plus, PMs take care of the work that most others are not interested in or ill-suited to do such as competitive analysis, pricing comparisons and hands-on market research.

3. Product Managers get paid to focus on the company’s most precious asset – the software product. As such, they don’t get distracted by extraneous Board politics, personnel nightmares, or coding challenges. PMs are product bodyguards.

4. Product Managers are also ombudsmen. They take in everyone else’s input and try to build synergy with those perspectives so there is optimal decision making. Conceptually like a wiki, a software PM is a human repository for all sorts of product input that comes together to produce the absolute answers to often tricky questions.

Being a product manager isn’t an easy job and its not one for most people. It takes a real dichotomy of talents to listen yet evangelize, be creative yet analytical, be technical yet good with customers. It also requires a significant talent to manage internal politics, external market forces and one’s own professional values and goals.

Find and hold on to good PMs. They can help captain the ship effectively. Without them, you run the risk of missing the boat and rowing twice as hard to stay afloat.