What do product managers do?
TL;DR a lot of different things!
I’m often asked about my job:
- What’s a typical day like?
- What is your role on the team?
- How is product management 1) like design, 2) like project management, 3) like business operations
So I thought it might be good to take all those ad hoc conversations and marry them up in one blog.
Disclaimer: there are a bewildering array of product management roles and responsibilities. So I’ll focus more on what I see in my day-to-day life. Please share what you see in the comments below!
Typical day
The easiest way for me to start is to describe a typical day. Yes, this really is a light week on my work calendar, with the confidential info blurred:
8:00am or earlier: recheck my calendar for last-minute additions and reschedules from people in earlier time zones. On the prior evening, I already prepped for meetings, rescheduled/delegated double-booked hours, and declined lower priority meetings.
8:00am-1:00pm: lead calls with Development, Design, Sales, Marketing, Ecosystem, Consultants, Account Owners/Managers, Product Managers, or Clients. Be the SME for my product in meetings, through Slack (DMs or channels), or via email.
Lunchtime-ish: somewhere in there, I eat a sandwich at my desk, sometimes get in a 30-minute workout, or <gasp> go out for lunch. I always eat something, or my afternoon productivity would take a nose dive.
1:00pm-onward: repeat my morning, but a few less meetings since it’s late for colleagues east of me. Afternoons are when I get to work on business strategy, do analysis, read up on the market, skill up on technologies, and participate in adhoc discussions.
End of day: prep for my meetings over the next two days. Yes next two days because some prep might require input from someone else. Reschedule, delegate, or decline double-booked meetings, as needed. Review and update my Trello board. Identify, document, and reflect on wins. Smile.
Roles and responsibilities
A lot of great articles are out there for describing the various roles and responsibilities. Just google them yourself. Instead, I like to describe my role in terms of my north-star metric: Revenue.
Primary goal: Make the revenue target
From my youngest days, I’ve lived an entrepreneurial life. My parents ran their own small business. So that meant the entire family focused on creating great products and ensuring that they sold. In our case, my family was building and selling custom homes. That same entrepreneurial spirit is why I make a great product manager — I’m always focused on the bottom line.
So how does that focus relate to a product manager role? Well let’s look at common job responsibilities:
- Product life cycle
- Requirements gathering and roadmap
- Competitive and market assessment
- End-to-end user experiences
- Go to market
- Market intelligence and client feedback
- Business and usage analytics
- Partner ecosystem
- Collaboration with almost every other part of the business
Depending on the size of your product, a single product manager might cover all of those responsibilities. Or, a team might divide up the responsibilities through the lens of one of these principles:
- Go-to-market, Routes, Business development, and Technical PM
- Outbound and Inbound PM
- Hybrid model
Fun things I get to do and drive real business impact
If you haven’t figured out by now, I spend my time meeting new people every day, so I can continually improve my products’ revenue potential. I’m lucky to work with so many talented people.
So to make the above responsibilities real, these are a few of the fun things I get to do while driving real business impact:
Self-service. Recently one of my work streams delivered a guided demo of my product. I love that I work with Design and Marketing to build something that engages a self-service model, where clients can get their first taste without ever talking to an IBMer. I’m passionate about self-service, which is why I champion and guide our content strategies across a variety of channels. That content strategy has led to well-regarded and highly used documentation. When a client is informed about a product, then the next step in the sales cycle goes more smoothly, and quickly.
Subject matter expertise and storytelling. Because I love digging into the technical intricacies of our products and in open source, I end up being one of our subject matter experts. That means I’m often writing about and reviewing the product, presenting internally and externally, and generally answering questions. Why that matters: for a technical product, our credibility and transparency go hand-in-hand. If the client can’t trust my company, our staff, and its content, why would they buy the product? BTW, how do I know it makes a difference? Quantitative analytics and qualitative user feedback are things I monitor continuously across the board.
Competitive and market insights. Do I get to be a fortune teller? Sometimes I think so. I often joke about my magic crystal ball. It’s got a solid success record in terms of its predictions. The reality behind that crystal ball is my continual observation of market trends, client use cases, the competition, and even comparative analysis. With that, I can inform the business about next opportunities, leap-frog moments, and high-revenue features.
So that’s about it. This article could run even longer, but it gives you a taste of product management. Please do share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.
July 6, 2021 update: One of my colleagues, Amod Bhise, has an expansive set of articles about product management. Check them out.
