A product manager is a person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality. . Like a CEO, product managers set the goals, define success, help motivate teams, and are responsible for the outcome.
What is the Role of a Product Manager?
The role of the product manager is to serve as a multiplier. The position is two jobs: coach and janitor.
As a coach, you’re empowering stakeholders and teammates to deliver the highest value. You’re defining what problem to solve, for who, why, and when. You drive the product vision, and you push your teams towards the north star of your imagination.
As a janitor, you’re unblocking teammates. You’re shielding them from blame and pressure, and you tackle high-value work that is low prestige.
Product Manager Responsibilities
- Talking to Customers
Whether in person or through other mediums such a customer supports tickets, phone, or video conferences, you should be spending time with your customers to understand that what your team is building is valuable for your customers.
- Strategic planning
It’s critical to stay in sync with changes in the industry and the competitive landscape, and if you must have a stance on what the future will look like in your space. You’re responsible not just for the current performance of the product, but also for the future performance of the product in 1 year, three years, and five years from now.
- Meetings with Other Teams
Depending on the company’s size, you’ll spend time with various cross-functional teams like sales, product marketing, and business development. You’ll also meet with your executive team to keep them up to date with your progress and customers and users to understand their pains and confirm whether your product is solving their needs.
Best practices and tips for being a great product manager
- Empathy and communication( Empower your team to make their own decisions)
One of the keys to excellent product management is empowering your team to make their own decisions by creating a shared brain — or a way of making decisions and a set of criteria for escalating them. When someone asks a product manager a question about a decision they could have made themselves, nine times out of 10, it’s because that person doesn’t have enough context to make the decision themselves.
- Ruthless prioritization
The product manager and the politician both get an allotted amount of resources. Each role requires the practitioner to make the best use of those resources to achieve a larger goal, knowing that he or she will never be able to satisfy everyone’s needs. Clearly understanding the costs and benefits of each choice guides the product manager toward the right decision.
Develop a thick skin
Making tradeoffs will inevitably make people unhappy. The trick is first to make the right tradeoffs and then be able to explain why you made the decision you did. If you’re good at explaining your decision, someone can still not like it, but more often than not, they’ll respect the way you made it. And even if they don’t, great product managers figure out a way to deal with it.
SUM UP: They connect business strategy, design knowledge, and customer needs to develop a product that is relevant, feasible, and valuable. PMs are focused on optimizing development to achieve the business goals and user necessities while maximizing return on investment.
