People.
We mentioned this before, but we are saying it again. Being a product manager is about people. Before we get into the mechanics of managing products, I wanted to talk about stakeholders. Stakeholders are the "who" when talking about a product, but it is a little more than just who is using your app: it is who is affected by your decisions when talking about your product. It is who cares about your product.
Let's take Google Maps. Fathom for a moment that you are the one PM working on Google Maps (Maps likely has dozen(s) of PMs, but let's simplify here.) Who are the stakeholders when it comes to Maps? You may be tempted to say "the users," but that is only a fraction of who cares about Maps. Here's a (likely incomplete) list of who could be considered stakeholders on Maps.
- End users
- The navigating users
- Cars
- Biking
- Transit
- Rideshare
- Walking
- Users trying to find business details
- Users trying to see how far away something is
- Users just looking at geography using Maps
- Users looking at where their friends are using shared locations
- Users of third-party apps that embed Maps (like Uber, Doordash, etc.)
- The navigating users
- Business owners who list their business on Maps
- Third-party developers who use Maps to embed map experiences in their apps
- Google Internal Users
- Your team
- Your boss/management team
- Sister teams that depend on Maps
- Teams on which you depend
- The dev-ops teams that keep Maps running
- Google Shareholders
As you can see, many ways exist to slice and dice these stakeholders. These folks have some stake in your app, and frequently many of them care about multiple facets of your product.
