What is Product Management?
Hello product people. What exactly does a product manager do all day, in your opinion?
At a startup, we might find a product manager making together product mock-ups, scheduling check-in points with devs, and conducting user interviews.
At a medium-sized tech company, we might find a product manager running planning meetings with a team of designers and devs, negotiating product roadmaps with executives, and working with colleagues in sales and customer support to understand and prioritize customer needs.
At a large enterprise, we might find a product manager rewriting feature requests as “job stories,” requesting specific data from analysts, and attending a whole lot of meetings.
Product managers do lots of different things at different times, and what exactly those things are can change at a moment’s notice.
Are there themes that unite the work of product management across job titles, industries, business models, and company sizes? What do you think?
As a product manager, I get this question from family members all the time and I'm never satisfied with my answer (bit off an inside joke among PMs).
I work with a tech lead and a designer on my team, it's my job to be the voice of the customer and the problem and bring that to the table so I, with my engineers and designer, can come up with a solution.
Virtually in any company of any size, this is what a good PM does.
Additionally, it's up to me to empower the team to do good work - that means setting them up for success with things like roadmapping, ensuring the work they do is meaningful, being the shit umbrella that protects them from the rest of the company, and being the funnel of information from the company to the team when it matters.
It results my days spent talking to customers, analyzing competitors, meeting other PMs, meeting business stakeholders, reading support tickets, writing documents, etc.
Hey Tyler. Thanks for this reply. I'm very happy to be a part of the product management world and really appreciate it when people try to help. I can’t thank you enough, man!
The broadest definition of a product manager I can think of is an entrepreneurial minded person that pushes the product forward.
Hi Jan, I totally agreed with your definition! That's a cool point.
The most succint definition I could give your for Product Management is:
This is like project management but with a focus on business outcome instead of
deliverables
What an interesting point! Thanks for replying.