Product Managers are at the core of the innovative products that change our daily lives. They are the unsung heroes of every successful product release – masters in the art of capturing customer feedback and insight, aligning the wide array of stakeholders across their company, and setting teams in the right direction to define product roadmaps and strategies. Product Managers are driven by passion and a desire to innovate – often with a unique blend of creativity and technical expertise.

Having spent the past 20 years managing, developing and marketing a number of different products, I have seen Product Managers face the challenge of inadequate resources, time and budget to do their job right. Managing a product is far more complex than just creating a simple list of features. Knowing what kind of product to develop and having the right time to market is not a trivial thing. For every story we hear about visionaries such as Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, it’s all about getting an intimate understanding of the customer needs and converting this knowledge into powerful products that will impact the market.

Whether you’re into classical music, marching bands or rock and roll – any great musical performance share a common thread of group alignment, collaboration and precise execution. Product Managers are very much like the conductor or leader of the Product Team. To deliver a great product, the Product Manager must stay on top of all incoming customer feedback and market information and convert this into insightful marketing and product requirements. They must then seek alignment and collaboration, ensuring that every stakeholder is executing a complex plan of action that will ultimately result in the release of a product that the customers will buy.

But unlike a rock band or a small orchestra, companies are often designed in a much more complex organization. People work in different spaces and locations, and can have agendas that are not always compatible with the Product Manager’s vision. On top of this, everyone involved suffers from data overload, which makes it very difficult to get all the stakeholders on the same page, using a common language and up-to-date set of information. Of course, with a lot of hard work, you can do a lot of bridge the gaps and making sure that everybody is in sync and moving in the same direction. But then again, Product Managers still need the time and bandwidth to think about the right kind of products they need to create.

Our vision at Ryma is to provide every Product Manager with a platform where they can maintain all the latest and relevant information, align all the stakeholders across the company, facilitate collaboration between teams, and help individuals execute to the best of their abilities. By automating or eliminating repetitive tasks, we help them focus on driving innovation. By facilitating collaboration and access to information, we improve the communication channels and overall efficiency. By assisting in the process of developing a product, we ultimately help Product Managers optimize the quality of execution – which is much needed to deliver better products to market in a shorter timeframe. We want to touch the lives of all Product Managers and give them the tools that will allow them to develop innovative and great products.