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Product Management is the glue holding together products and services as they are being conceived of and built. Until now, product management was generally an engineering activity or a marketing role in a large corporation. In marketing, product management was called brand management and was heavily influenced by what competitors were doing. Brand managers studied massive amounts of quantitative pricing, sales, and trend data in order to make small shifts to soft goods or consumables. Their impact was derived from maximizing value from small market positioning shifts. In more engineering-centric corporations, like big software companies, product managers learned to gather requirements from stakeholders, mix them together into a series of features, and work with developers to launch software. Their role was heavily focused on developing software with a large breadth of features and functions that could be viewed as competitive.

But modern startups have proven that industry disruption is possible by focusing not on adding features or improving sales, but on providing deep, meaningful engagement to the people that use their products or services. This engagement is achieved by delivering simple products that have a soul: the products feel less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends.

Achieving this type of emotional engagement is often considered a black art. But for social communities like Etsy or physical products like Nest Thermostat, product management is a competency rooted in the field of design. Design doesn't refer only to aesthetics or usability, although those are things consumers are most likely to see or appreciate. It is a more comprehensive way of thinking about people and human behavior, and it is a product development process that features empathy with a community of potential consumers in order to identify problems to solve. This process leverages pattern matching in order to "infer" solutions to those problems that will have meaningful emotional appeal. Designer and consultant Jon Kolko has been engaged in this process of design for over 15 years, and has perfected a repeatable, teachable set of steps for identifying lucrative opportunities, designing for innovation, and producing products that have deep, meaningful emotional engagement.