What Exactly Product Managers Do

Just a list of roles PMs are often found doing in organisations

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Since there is a lot of ambiguity around the PM role and responsibilities vary across organisations depending on a number of factors like the stage the company is in, I thought I might make a list of roles different PMs might be undertaking, in the context of early-stage and growth stage product organisations:

• Bring order to the team, by being the single POC who holds context and disseminate when needed.
• Sometimes, they may have to identify and lead quick, focus on easy wins even before setting up a long term product roadmap to gain trust.
• Give breathing room to founders and leaders by taking up the execution part.
• Channel and communicate strategy from top level to the lower levels.
• Translating business requirements to product outcomes.
• Triaging incoming customer issues, focus on prioritisation and make small, steady improvements.
• Connect the dots between support, sales and engineering.
• Unlock engineering bandwidth to enable focus on writing code.
• Focus on low cost, high impact experimentation.
• In a high trust environment with the CXOs, PMs can make quick decision-making especially on lower level product decisions.
• Engineers with good product sense and an understanding of UI/UX and APIs can make good PMs.
• Sometimes, initial PMs are forward-deployed engineers who focus on fixing existing issues before directly working with customers.
• Some people also bring a new skillset to the table like an IC superpower such as strong technical knowledge or specialised skills and knowledge on UX, data or marketing. Domain knowledge would be what makes some others remarkable.
• The PM- tech lead-design lead chemistry is crucial to success of any product.
• Only PMs with passion for the product and a keen intuitive awareness of what the customers need can gain trust from engineers.
• Be a leader and innovator, not a manager. More hands-on you are, more trust and respect you earn. It’s important to focus on your IC superpowers while building teams and practices slowly and steadily.
• More often than not, it’s the PM’s responsibility to synthesise insights from chaos so that the engineers do not get caught up in the whirlwind and can actually focus on building the product and bringing engineering excellence to the table.

This is the sixth among a series of articles by Adithya Sailesh, aimed at consolidating the product management knowledge that I gained from my structured and otherwise learning journey and successful career switch from software development to product management that started over a year ago. The primary goal of this series is to help aspiring/beginner product managers by comprehensively covering all the essential fundamentals, making this leap a lot easier and fruitful.