What is a Product Manager?

Many product management roles arose within the last 20 years, and as a new discipline, the function can differ across companies and industries. Product management roles in the U.S. have grown an astounding 32% from August 2017 to June 2019, which is five times more than the growth for all jobs overall. Interest in specific roles, such as growth product manager, has increased 425% on average each month in the last five years.

Here is everything you might want to know about what a product manager does.

What is a product manager?

As Atlassian describes: “A product manager is a person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.”

A product manager might work in the marketing team outside of technology companies. They can often tell you about the market and industry, previous marketing campaigns, and a go-to-market strategy.

Here is what a product manager’s responsibility looks like at a software company:

1. A product manager is not a manager.

A product manager’s primary responsibility is to care for a product and not necessarily a team. They act as a product owner and must maximize product value.

2. A product manager is not an engineer.

While some companies and recruiters might require a product manager to have a computer science degree, product managers are not software engineers. Having a solid technical background is an excellent advantage for your job but isn’t required.

Product managers decide on the “what” and not the “how.” They determine what the product team should implement to maximize value for the consumer or end-user. In contrast, an engineer or development team implements the product and technology as outlined by the product manager.

3. A product manager is not a designer.

The best product managers have a good understanding of a customer or end user’s needs. While having a user-experience background is helpful and can help a product manager tailor a product, they don’t need to be proficient in design.

Product managers often work with user-interface or user-experience designers and can delegate design responsibilities.

What does a product manager do?

A product manager is a person responsible for the success of a product. A product can be an app, product line, or even a section of a website or product.

Some typical responsibilities of a product manager include:

• Product road mapping, including determining the actions or resources needed to bring a product to life
• User research
• Data analysis
• Project management
• Strategy
• Stakeholder and cross-functional management

There are four common types of product managers. Keep in mind that the role and responsibilities of a product manager can differ by company, organization and product.

1. Consumer product manager: Common responsibilities include ideation, testing, data analysis and user research to prioritize work for new features.
2. Internal product manager: Internal product managers build products for users within their company, including software for the customer service team, for example. Primary responsibilities might include project management.
3. Business-to-business product manager: Business-to-business or enterprise product managers generally have fewer customers or end-users than consumer products. A challenge for enterprise product managers is sometimes building products for a different audience than the purchase decision-maker. For example, a customer’s finance organization might decide to purchase the product, but they won’t be the end-user.
4. Technical product manager: Common responsibilities include solving complex technology challenges or complex products.

The bottom line

Product management is an in-demand role at many companies. Product managers generally must be strong communicators, understand technology, have a bias toward problem-solving, and be a leader who can motivate others to improve and complete work.

This article was written by Eduardo Mignot for HackerNoon and was lightly edited and republished with permission.