Here is a little secret for you – No one knows!
It’s not that no one knows, it’s more like everyone and every company expects different things from a product manager or from the product management organization. I know there is a very dry and uninformative definition on Wikipedia, but remember, someone just like you and I wrote that definition – it’s just an opinion, not scientific fact.
Product management is like a sausage. Anything that doesn’t nicely fit into other parts of the organization is thrown over to product managers. Engineering designs or develops the product, marketing does corporate outbound marketing, finance crunches numbers (I’m really trying to control myself here to not say bean coun… 🙂 ), manufacturing builds the products, sales sells the product and HR does…. hmmm.. pretends to care for the employees, but really just makes sure that legally nobody can go after the company if an employee is mistreated or fired. Did I just type that? Well, someone’s gotta be honest and tell the truth on the internet, right?
If a task doesn’t nicely fit into one of these organizations within the company, then guess who owns it? Yep, product managers.
In the broadest sense, product managers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the product:
What customer problem are we trying to solve?
What product to build or which features to add?
What should be the price and positioning?
What’s the go to market plan?
What’s the forecast so that manufacturing knows how many and when to build?
What promotions to run?
Understand the competitive landscape and adapt accordingly
Understand the changing needs of the customer
Know when to end of sale the product
and a million more, but I tried to capture the major tasks above.
Some people may claim that product managers don’t do the following:
Create mockups
Sign deals
Plan PR
They are wrong. I’ve seen many product managers also do the above. Having said that, depending on your background or what your company does, product managers typically gravitate towards one of the 4 types of product management personas:
Business Product Manager
Wait what? Isn’t every product management role involved in the business aspect? Yes, of course, but this type of product manager most likely recently got an MBA and is focused on pricing, margins, discounts, promotions and how to further customize the product for each of the vertical markets it serves.
Technical
This type of product manager probably spent way too much time as an engineer and now focuses way too much on the nitty gritty details of every single feature and how it’s implemented in the backend, whether the product is purely software or consists of software and hardware.
Designer
The designer product manager is more common in software only (and SaaS) type companies. This product manager is more focused on the UI/UX more than anything else. This makes sense particularly with B2C SaaS or software products. Think of facebook, linked, amazon and google user interfaces. How do you design it so that everything feels intuitive?
Generalist
If you don’t fall into any of the above 3, then you are probably a generalist. Maybe you are good at capturing the skills, intuition and passion of the above 3, resulting in a rockstar product manager or maybe you suck at all three and you are just a glorified note taker. I don’t know you, so, I can’t comment. But, you know who you are 🙂
What do you think product management is? Would love to hear your thoughts!