What does a product manager do?
“I don’t know what a product manager does, but our investors tell us we need to hire one.”
This was what the CEO of a Y Combinator funded startup told me when I was interviewing to be their first product manager. To be fair, he was open to learning more and even ended up making an offer. This wasn't the last time I got asked that question by someone who worked for a technology company. This is why, whenever I speak to someone who wants to break into PM, I start with what I believe the product manager role is all about.
What a product manager does not do
There are many misconceptions about the product management role. In my experience, here are the most common ones:
The CEO of the product: A CEO can hire people, fire people, set budgets, and get features built because they said so. A PM can do none of these things.
The person coming up with ideas for features: I love my fellow PMs, but let’s be honest. We’re not rocket scientists. One part of solving technical problems is the ability to know what technologies have matured or are maturing. PMs don’t invent new products. Product teams made up of talented engineers and designers do. PM's create guardrails within which these innovations take place.
The business person in the engineering team: business people care about revenue, costs, and profits. PMs care about all these, but most importantly, PMs care about the user.
The engineering person in the business team: Similar to the above, engineers care about solving interesting problems with technology. The PM cares about that too. But most importantly - the PM cares about the user.
Project Manager for the engineering team: Project managers ensure that features get built on time and under budget. Product Managers lose credibility if those features suck. That being said, all great PMs are also good project managers. 100% of the products you don’t ship, fail.
Then, what the heck does a PM do?
PMs come in different flavors depending on products they manage. However, in my experience, the best product managers do two things incredibly well:
Create empathy for the user within the product team and the company
Reconcile the needs of internal stakeholders with the needs of the market
Let’s unpack these in greater detail.
Creating empathy for the user
Creating truly magical products is messy. It doesn’t just happen in brainstorming meetings or offsite retreats - It happens over conversations at the water cooler. Or in the form of an idea that takes hold of you at 1 AM in the night that you can’t wait to tell your team about it the next morning.
A good product manager helps the team focus these moments of epiphany by ensuring that every member of the product team understands their target users' needs, pains, and aspirations.
And, product teams that empathize with their users make hard trade-offs with confidence because they know what matters the most for their target market.
Translating user needs
The sales team cares about meeting quotas.
The engineering team cares about scalable, reliable, and, most importantly, exciting technology.
The operations team cares about doing things faster, with less money.
The marketing team cares about larger marketing budgets.
The design team cares about building beautiful, functional products.
Notice how none of these teams are explicitly incentivized to care about building what the market needs? Again, if the PM has done the first part of their job well, they’ve already created user empathy. However, the reactive part of the product manager’s job is to align the benefits of building the right product for the right market to each of these stakeholders. So, when the PM talks to the sales team, they will mention how building feature X will help the sales team sell more product. When the PM talks to the engineering team, they talk about how many millions of users will be using it.
This, perhaps, is the reason why the PM role is so misunderstood. Each stakeholder experiences the PM differently, speaking a different language. Skilled PMs build influence primarily by knowing how to align the market’s incentives with the incentives of their internal stakeholders. Humility, charm, and openness make it much more likely that a PM can start those conversations.
Further reading
Here are a few related articles by other writers that I've enjoyed reading. Also, if you liked this, you can subscribe to my mailing list to stay up-to-date with new posts.
Empathy: A product manager's key to success - by Catherine Shyu
Good product manager, bad product manager - by Ben Horowitz and David Weiden
A Letter To A New Product Manager - by Brian Armstrong
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