Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.

Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.

What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.

As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.

Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one