“What would you say you do around here?”

In Michael Lewis’ book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, Lewis describes how he intended to write the story when his first child was born. I can confirm, however, that the first kid showing up is such a whirlwind that all plans get dropped like a new gym membership in February.

So like Lewis’ fatherhood journey, I had planned on documenting my transition into Product Management at the start of my career in the field. But by week 2, I was drinking from the firehose that is PM life, and it took me 14 months to sit down and take stock of where I’ve been, and what I’ve done.

So I’m sharing this experience because when I was trying to make this transition, the biggest question for me was, “what — exactly — is a product manager?”

I want to pull back the curtain on my time as a Product Manager because I know there is someone who is just on the cusp of taking a chance on being a PM, but needs help figuring out how they could possibly fit in.

Here is a good place to start.

What is a Product Manager?

The short answer is, there is no single type of Product Manager; PM’s are as varied as the products they manage. Some PM’s oversee very technical products, while some focus on a single, discreet feature of a broader app. Allegedly there are individual PM’s for every one of the reaction buttons on Facebook’s feed!

Googling this question will give you endless lists of varied descriptions of the broad tasks in the Product Management job description:

• “Oversee[s] the company’s product and the technological innovation behind them”
• “[F]ocuses on product strategy to create, distribute, sell, and obtain feedback on a specific product or service.

Google’s AI chat bot, Bard, provided less of an overall description of what a Product Manager is, and more of a list of features of a fictitious PM may possess.

It wasn’t particularly useful at providing a larger picture. Sure, PM’s do the stuff Bard says. But a list of responsibilities doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s like trying to put a puzzle together without the box to know what it is supposed to look like.

So what is a Product Manager to me?

If we were at a bar having a drink, I’d say something like “a PM does understands what feature the business needs to satisfy their customer base, and gathers the resources to bring that feature to life so the customer will love it”.

This is a vague answer, and that is on purpose. Because a lot of what the Product Manager does exists in the vague space between what a customer says (important so I’ll reiterate — says) they want, and a solution that the business can provide.

The Problem with Problems

It isn’t always a direct line from customer request to product roll out. In the must-read-for-any-aspiring-or-currently-existing-PM-book The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olson, Olson defines two sectors of product discovery; Problem Space and Solution Space.

The problem space is where a PM stews in the discomfort of not having an answer to a customer’s problems. “Stews in discomfort” is the best description I can think of, because when a person typically hears a problem from a customer, we tend to race to jam our solution into the hole they are describing.

After all, customer service is about making customers happy, and asking customers probing questions about the deeper meaning of their displeasure with our product doesn’t usually make us feel very good.

But a good PM doesn’t rush to solve the issue. Instead, a good PM picks at the problem. In reality, the answer may not be the first solution that you can come up with. OR, as is often the case, you may find out that the hole really isn’t the hole, but something else is.

The example you will always come across in product literature is something like, “if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse…” implying that before he changed the world with the Model T, people couldn’t have conceived of anything beyond a horse that magically had a set of extra legs.

Instead of trying to bioengineer a horse that had more giddy up, he created a machine that had strength and speed of 20 horses.

The purpose of the problem space is to think like Henry Ford and not settle on the fact that people wanted to a faster animal, but to understand that MORE people wanted to see MORE of their world. It is how the car became a symbol of freedom, because now the owner could travel further and longer than they previously could with a single horse.

And he didn’t settle on just making a machine with the strength and speed of 20 horses, he focused on making the Model T affordable to the general public, so that more people could experience its freedom-granting mobility.

The solution wasn’t a faster horse, the solution was a population that could move around the country and not die of dysentery on the way.

Every product manager won’t be as visionary as Henry Ford, or Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or any of the other “legendary” product people. Getting into the PM game to be just like one of those guys is like picking up a basketball for the first time and thinking you’re gonna be the next Kobe or Candace. Aspiration is good, but lets manage expectations (more on THAT later).

However, every PM should be curious enough to spend time NOT knowing the solution to a problem. The not knowing will drive him or her to not only look for available solutions, but to also explore why the problem exists, and where the current solutions succeed or fail at solving that problem.

So what, then, is a Product Manager?

There will always be a lot of different answers to this question. But the main thing a PM is, is a problem whisperer — pulling all the threads in order to find the core of an issue.