Product Managers Build Problems, Not Solutions
A number of these blog posts that I am writing are going to be referencing an article or a piece of an article that I recently read. This may benefit you, it may not, but my intention is to build a library of principles which I follow to be the best Product Manager I can be.
I recently read What Your Product Teams Want to Know (and How You Can Tell Them) on the Pendo blog and a portion of the article related to a principle that I wanted to call out: Product Managers need to focus more on the problem and understanding the problem behind a feature request.
While this article was more targeted towards folks working with Product Managers (i.e. stakeholders), it does well to articulate a point that I think is one of the main responsibilities of Product Managers — synthesizing and analyzing a variety of feature requests in many different forms to build a prioritized list of problems to solve with their team.
Without a Product Manager, requests come in, engineers fix the request and the end product is not always a valuable solution. I am reminded of the classic tree swing metaphor showing the many ways a product or feature can be created incorrectly due to this breakdown in communication and process:
TLDR — One of the main responsibilities of a Product Manager is to understand the problems behind all the requests they receive so that they can prioritize the problems and work with engineering to find a solution.
Questions? Feedback? Let me know!
