A pause to revisit: What’s the Product Manager’s role?
The role of a Product Manager in organizations is complex and varies widely from place to place and from time to time. Because of that, its definition does too, ranging from all sorts of responsibilities, activities and skills .
There are numerous articles and books explaining what the Product Manager’s job is. Today I’m sharing one more — focused on its responsibilities and activities— which, even though not the most extensive definition, is the one which at the date of today, I resonate with the most.
The Product Manager’s role
The Product Manager’s ultimate responsibility is to create a solution that is valuable, viable, feasible, and usable.
The Product Manager’s role is to understand customer problems very well, rally the team to build the winning product, and then iterate until it gets it right.
Ultimately, this is what being a Product Manager is all about.
The caveat, is that for this to be achieved, there are many many (many!) activities and sub-responsibilities underlined. Let’s see what that looks like.
Product Manager’s activities
The Product Manager’s individual activities should focus explicitly on identifying if a solution is valuable and viable.
This while relying on, and working collaboratively with, its team of developers and designers to ensure its feasibility and usability.
In other words, the PM should focus on:
- Listening to customers’ problems and how to solve them
- Performing experiments and prototypes for potential solutions
- Evaluating the value of what was delivered
- Maximizing value while minimizing the effort to build it
- Optimizing the product based on customer feedback
As it evolves to a senior position, the PM should also be responsible for strategy-related activities as:
- Define the vision and mission of the product, aligned with the company’s
- Define the strategy of how that will be achieved
- Define product and process principles
- Set the priorities of tasks and problems to solve
- Set objectives
- Evangelize and inspire the team and stakeholders towards a common goal
- Hire the best talent
- Coach and nurture team members
Underlining all of these activities are, of course, numerous skills that need to be crafted.
A Product Manager is a Manager
A Product Manager, even though with ultimate responsibility on the product-side of what’s being built, is nonetheless a manager.
This means that, underlying all the mentioned activities, a PM:
- Supports and enables others to achieve their work: It does whatever is necessary to help and unblock their peers.
- Is a coach: Obsesses over the team members’ well-being and in making them grow. A PM deeply cares about its peers, and in helping them achieve both their teams’ and career goals.
- Fosters and helps making decisions: Many product decisions will come from their team members, specially when it comes to its feasibility and usability. The role of a PM is to help and ensure these decisions are made, breaking any ties that may appear in the process. The PM’s role is to extract the most of their smart team to achieve the best decisions and results.
- Empowers the team: The PM trusts and enables their team to make their job and make their own decisions. The PM sets the right environment to enable these to happen.
In the long term, being a manager it’s all about people — beyond and above everything else.
A Product Manager is a Leader
A Product Manager is only strong if also being a strong leader: leadership is what connects and multiplies the impact of everything she does.
Leadership is partially invisible to the eye and complex to define: I believe that in many ways is not something you can specify, but a state of mind — one that then leads you to exude the leadership traits we all recognize.
Because of that I will finish by paraphrasing Bill Campbell, Bill Walsh and probably many others with what, in my opinion, communicates much of what is the essence of being a leader:
Leadership is about getting great results through others — about enabling them to achieve the vision that you created and inspired them to achieve.
Leadership is about recognizing there’s greatness in everybody, and creating the right environment for that to emerge. It’s about having the courage to demonstrate and to say: “I believe in you”.
What I’m improving
Product Management includes such a wide range of skills that it’s almost impossible to be very good on all stack, or to be able to improve on all fronts at once.
Personally, I do have many aspects to improve of course. But currently, there are three aspects I’m focusing on:
- Ensuring better alignment between team members, and between product <> organization. This is done through the strategy-related tasks mentioned above, as ensuring the product’s vision, strategy, goals, and priorities are clear for everyone.
- Empowering the team more. By delegating even more of the activities and decisions I was used to be doing (ex: Features’ usability).
- Coaching. I’m getting back to my roots of coaching, by focusing more of my time and energy in trying to help people grow as professionals and individuals.
Product Management is hard and complex, with its role varying so much from organization to organization, project to project, and time to time.
Nonetheless, having a clear understanding of what’s our role in each situation is crucial to do a good job. Sometimes it’s good to stop for a moment, go back to the basics and ask ourselves: What’s my role here?
Further Reading:
- Book: Strong Product People, Petra Wille
- Book: Inspired, Marty Cagan
- Book: The Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt
- Article:Product Manager Job Description, Marty Cagan
- Article: Leadership vs Management, Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher
I’m Daniel, Product manager with 8 years of experience — from working on MVPs to mature businesses -, and in creating a great company (Whitesmith) from the ground-up.
Paper Planes is where I reflect on my experiences and lessons on the craft of Product Management.
