What is the job of a product manager?

The role of product management can seem opaque to many people. Being a PM means different things in different companies, and different things to different people.

There have been many great posts on the role of a product manager in the past. The classics include Ben Horowitz’s “Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager,” Adam Nash’s “Be a Great Product Leader,” Ian McAllister’s response to “What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%?” and Satya Patel’s “We are Product Managers.” Many of these posts are more than 5 years old, so I thought it would be great to refresh the answer to the question, “What is the job of the product manager?”

I believe in the wisdom of crowds, so I decided to Tweet a question recently where I asked the following:

From this and a subsequent Tweet on the topic, I got a total of 18 responses as of this writing. Most of the responses came from PMs whom I have worked with and highly respect from companies such as Twitter, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Uber, Pinterest, and Disney. I also got a few responses from non-PMs as well.

From these responses, I heard three key themes emerge for the job of a product manager:

• Vision: deeply understand your customers, and develop a long-term, differentiated vision to solve their problems.
• Execution: define your product, ship it, and measure its impact
• Leadership: motivate your teams, negotiate with others, and sell your vision internally and externally.

Let’s dive into these three themes more closely.

Vision

Many PMs who responded to my question on Twitter mentioned “Vision,” and really customer-driven vision, as an important responsibility of a product manager:

“Develop an inspiring vision, strategy and roadmap”

“Curate roadmap and product vision”

“Understand the customer’s needs”

“Understand what people need (not just what they think they need)

One of the most important things that product managers do is to develop a compelling, innovative product vision. What problem are you solving for customers? How is your solution better than the customers’ alternatives? What is distinct and innovative about your approach? In order to create a compelling vision, you need to deeply understand your customers and develop unique insights.

Deeply understanding your customers

There are many tools you can use to deeply understand your customers, including the Jobs to Be Done framework, Building Handcrafted Solutions, or following the principles of Human-Centered Design. Amazon uses the process of Working Backwards.

You need to go out and spend time with your customers. Observe their behavior in their environment, and then identify problems, opportunities, and triggers for behavior. Once you have this deep understanding, you can design proposed solutions to the customer problem. You should expect to iterate your solution with repeated tests with real customers.

Developing unique insights

It’s not enough to deeply understand your customers — you also need to develop unique insights in order to create an innovative vision.

According to Peter Thiel, former co-founder and CEO of PayPal (and early Facebook investor), every breakthrough innovative product depends on discovering an important truth that very few people agree with you on — a “secret,” an idea that was once unknown and unsuspected.

There are a few tools you can use to push yourself to develop unique insights and discover a “secret,” including First Principles Thinking and Thinking 10x.

Other tools come from the academic world. According to Wharton professor Adam Grant in his book Originals, there are three methods for developing unique insights and creative ideas: (1) question defaults; (2) generate a lot of ideas (“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.” — Linus Pauling), and (3) get peer feedback.

And finally, according to Warren Bennis, author of A More Beautiful Question, you can also develop creative insights by adopting a Beginner’s Mind, noticing things others miss, and using the Five Whys approach.

Execution

Vision alone is not enough to be an exceptional product manager. We need to be able to get things done. “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything,” is an often repeated mantra for PMs and entrepreneurs.

Accordingly, many PMs mentioned “Execution” as an important responsibility of a product manager:

“Get shit done, whatever it takes.”

“Build the right thing and get it shipped.”

“Building products that creates value for the user and shipping it :)”

“Ensuring those products get built, measuring whether those products are delivering value.”

“Own the quality and speed of the teams decision making.”

Execution is about getting stuff done, shipping products, and driving impact. While vision is about long-term strategy, execution is about shipping an actual product in the short term. With product execution, there are many activities required, but I wanted to call out two: defining the product and making effective decisions.

Defining the product

For PMs, execution starts with defining the product. This in turn requires the PM to define the customer problem, determine the goals and metrics for the product, and then brainstorm and prioritize solutions to the problem.

PMs who are great at execution deliver products with the maximum impact — or “output.” In his classic book High Output Management, former Intel CEO Andy Grove shared important lessons for how PMs can maximize the output of their products.

• Select the right output metric (the indicator that you use to measure business value)
• Prioritize your products and features by using the output metric
• Choose high-leverage product features (select features that generate high output)

There are other best practices for how PMs can define products to have the maximum impact, including the following:

• Simplify your products by focusing on a few core features and ignoring everything else. (“Start with something simple”)
• Evaluate both customer value and differentiation in order to pick winning product features.
• Take an iterative, hypothesis-driven approach by adopting the “Strong opinions, weakly held” mindset.

Making effective decisions

During the process of actually building and delivering a product, PMs are responsible for helping the team get to a quality decision — around the product scope, goals, schedule, trade-offs, or any other number of issues. Great PMs will involve the right stakeholders in getting to a decision to ensure that there is enough commitment and buy-in to the decision when it is made. In many cases, the PM may need to ultimately make a product decision herself.

As PMs work towards helping their teams get to a quality decision, there are a number of tools they can use:

• Framing decisions as either Type 1 (not reversible) or Type 2 (reversible) decisions
• Avoiding maximizing behavior when satisficing will do
• Creating a Day One hypothesis to tackle complex decisions (also used as the “strong opinion” part of Strong Opinions, Weakly Held)
• Being “directionally right, same order of magnitude” to avoid analysis paralysis
• Framing decisions with “what do you have to believe?” questions

Leadership

Vision and Execution are two-thirds of the PM’s job. The last piece is providing Leadership — motivating teams, negotiating with others, and selling your vision internally and externally. In response to my question on Twitter, many PMs mentioned aspects of Leadership:

“Internal selling & negotiation (up the chain, x-fn, x-team)”

“Sell team contributions internally”

“Lead and inspire the team and company, be a true owner”

“Communication across, up, and down the org is key to success.”

There are many books and articles on leadership, so I will limit my discussion here to a few best practices and topics that I think are especially relevant to product managers. PMs need to have the right mindset, must work hard at earning and building trust, and must have excellent communication and persuasion skills.

The right mindset

PMs work with extended virtual teams of engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product marketers, communications managers, and customer support managers. Many of these colleagues look to the product manager for guidance and direction, especially in the face of uncertainty and during challenges or setbacks. As such, it is critical for PMs to have the right mindset to lead teams: they must demonstrate a growth mindset, resilience, and grit.

Earning and building trust

PMs practice “influence without authority.” They must be able to convince others to provide support and resources to their projects. In order to do this, PMs must earn and build trust with their colleagues and with their management.

One important approach for building trust is by being a “giver” rather than a “taker.” Givers give more than they get, and they focus on others’ needs. Takers take more than they give, and they focus on their own needs. According to Wharton professor Adam Grant in his book Give and Take, givers are more successful than takers over the long term in three dimensions of work:

• Building networks: givers build broader networks and leverage the value of dormant ties.
• Collaboration: givers demonstrate expedition behavior (putting the group’s goals and mission ahead of your own) and readily share credit with their team for any achievements.
• Communication: givers tend to ask questions and seek advice, which builds trust, increases their own knowledge, and builds commitment with their audience.

PMs who operate as givers are much more likely to earn the trust of teams that they must influence without authority.

Another framework for building trust is from Stephen M. R. Covey in his book Speed of Trust. Covey argues that credibility is the foundation of trust, and credibility consists of four cores:

1. Integrity: not just honesty, but acting in accordance with your words, values, beliefs.
2. Intent: our motives, our agendas, and our behavior. We inspire trust when we care about others, seek mutual benefit, and act in the best interests of others.
3. Capabilities: we inspire trust from others when they see our capabilities and their relevance to the task at hand.
4. Results: when you consistently deliver results, you earn the trust of your colleagues and your management.

PMs that build credibility for themselves through integrity, intent, capabilities and results will earn the trust to be able to influence their teams and management.

Excellent communication and persuasion skills

Many of the responses to my original question about the job of the PM were around “selling” — selling product vision and team contributions, and persuading colleagues and management to lend their support.

To effectively communicate with executives, PMs can use the Pyramid Principle and the Rule of 3 (most effectively, in combination). In both written and verbal communication, PMs should always ask themselves “Where’s the So What?” and push themselves to synthesize, not just summarize.

PMs must make persuasive arguments in order to gain support for their proposals. At its core, an argument consists of a conclusion and one or more premises, or claims. According to T. Edward Damer in his book Attacking Faulty Reasoning, there are five principles of good argument: (1) structure, (2) relevance, (3) acceptability, (4) sufficiency, and (5) rebuttal. The best PMs are able to craft compelling arguments by following these five principles.

Finally, in order to persuade their audience, it’s important for PMs to create messages that stick. According to authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick, compelling messages that stick are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. Excellent PMs are able to take complex and ambiguous concepts, and communicate them in simple and concrete language. They inspire their teams and their organizations to support their product vision with appeals to emotion and through compelling storytelling.

I began this post by observing that the job of a product manager can be mysterious to many people. I “crowd-sourced” the answer to the question, “What is the job of a product manager?” and heard these three themes:

• Vision
• Execution
• Leadership

To develop an innovative product vision, PMs must deeply understand customer needs and then develop unique insights. To understand customers, PMs can use the Jobs to Be Done approach or Human-Centered Design. To develop unique insights, PMs should use First Principles Thinking, question defaults, and have a Beginner’s Mind.

Vision alone is not enough to have impact; PMs also must be able to execute, get things done, and ship products quickly. Two important factors for execution for PMs are defining the product and making effective decisions. To define the product, PMs must select the right output (impact) metric and prioritize features by the output metric. In addition, PMs must simplify their products as much as possible, and take an iterative, hypothesis-driven approach (using “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”). To make effective decisions, PMs can use tools like the Day One Hypothesis or framing decisions as Type 1/Type 2 decisions.

The final responsibility of a PM is leadership. Products are built by teams, and teams look to the PM for guidance, direction, and leadership. To help teams persist through setbacks and challenges, PMs must have a growth mindset and demonstrate resilience and grit. PMs can build trust by operating as givers (not takers), and by creating credibility for themselves through integrity, intent, capabilities, and results. Finally, PMs have to sell their ideas and their team’s contributions with excellent communication and persuasion skills. To communicate with executives, PMs can use the Pyramid Principle or the Rule of 3. To create messages that stick, PMs can communicate in simple, concrete language and inspire their audiences with storytelling.

The job of a PM is hard, but it is also incredibly rewarding. As a PM, you’re able to solve customer problems and create world-changing impact. You get to work with diverse teams to tackle difficult challenges and create innovative solutions. I hope after reading this post you are inspired to become a PM if you’re not already one! Or, if you are a PM, I hope to have provided you with some helpful tools. Let me know if you have any feedback in comments, or find me on Twitter.

Special thanks to Ivan Santana for reviewing this post.