They want to create something that they find meaningful, while also ensuring that it’s sustainable and maintainable over the long run. The development team consists of engineers and designers. It seeks to monetize goods and services so that it can employ people and create wealth for its owners. The business is an organization that is focused on sustainably providing value to shareholders in the long run. They’re willing to pay time, money, or both to have their pain addressed. The customer is someone who is experiencing pain. In a world with no product managers, we can generalize all people to be in one of three groups: the customer, the business, and the development team. Let’s use a diagram to illustrate a world with no product managers. To truly further under what a product manager does, let's dive into the theory of product management. They’re working with different kinds of customers, different kinds of business stakeholders, and different kinds of development teams. That might mean that the product manager needs to be much better at technical skills.Īs a different example, a consumer product manager might be serving millions of customers, and therefore needs to be highly quantitative.Īs yet another example, a B2B product manager might only serve a dozen total customers, and therefore needs to be highly skilled at change management, negotiations, and objection handling.Įven within the same company, you might see a dazzling variety of product managers, because each product manager is handling a fundamentally different problem space. Think of the product manager as connective tissue - they tackle everything that falls outside of the bounds of any of the three core groups.īecause every product has a different constellation of customers, businesses, and developers, that every product manager is inherently different, because the type of white space that they’ll occupy is different.Īs an example, an API product manager might have customers who are all engineers. The product manager manages all of the white space around the product. PMs are focused on optimizing a product to achieve the business goals and user necessities while maximizing return on investment. What is a Product Manager?Ī product manager connects business strategy, design knowledge, and customer needs in order to develop a product that is relevant, feasible, and valuable.
Part of the challenge with describing what a product manager does is that the role of a product manager is inherently poorly defined.
Colleges are starting to create new majors and programs focused solely on product management due to high demand. In business schools around the world, MBA students have set their sights on product management as their dream job. Product managers are amongst the highest-compensated, most well-respected professions in the world today, even though they’re among the least understood. I’m always fascinated by this question, because the person who’s asking is already interested in product management, even though they have no idea what it is. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked: “What is a product manager, and how do I become one?”
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