BANGALORE, INDIA:“Role of a product manager is to define product and services that create value for the customer and profit growth for the company,” says Kirthiga Reddy, VP & GM, FailSafe and Phoenix India, while talking at a session held as part of Spark IT 2010.

Taking a session on Product Management Fundamentals, Kirthiga further said, “Apart from this, they also answer some questions like who, how and what is the value that they help adding to the company. She defined journey of product management into three parts as concept, execution and delivery.

She added that the companies slice product management differently; product manager could be structured as CEO of the product. It can also be sliced more narrowly like eBay that worked towards out-bound analysis.

Another session on Project Cost and Schedule Management by Binod Maliel, Consultant, Trainer, Coach, ValYouAdd Consultancy threw light on two major topics namely schedule management and cost management.

Maliel came with an example of a 21-week project, which has 9 distinct tasks to be covered under given timings and resources, he demonstrated about the various processes like calculating backward pass for float, critical path, and crushing it through more resources.

While talking about the cost management, he said the cost baseline is always an S-curve in the graph. “Lots of resources are used during the middle of the project journey. So it is critical for the project manager to track the cost at certain point of time and in order to do that a project manger should get time to time updates about the progress from the project implementation team,” Maliel added.