The Confusion
Whether you are already in a role of a product manager or even thinking about a job in product management, one thing is fixed and pretty common: you will always hear different definitions of a product manager, from anyone you ask.
It’s been always confusing to understand what product manager does on a daily basis? Is the product manager really a “CEO of the product”, is he the person who manages the product or both? Well defining a product manager as “CEO of the product” is broad and misunderstood whereas defining as a person who manages the product is a much narrower view of product management.
The exact definition may vary based on number of factors and also heavily depends on which industry or company is asking. Major differences exist between the responsibilities of a product manager and the way they do business in a large enterprise, and what a product manager needs to do when working in a start-up.
After doing a lot of research and experiencing working in both environments, alongside many industry leaders and experts, who have spent half of their lives in doing and campaigning product management, I came to conclusion that we should stop trying to create a standard definition of the product manager’s role and instead spell out the various roles and responsibilities a product manager must habitually play in a dynamic environment and write down the roles that this person should undertake in technology companies both large and small step by step.
The Role & Responsibilities
Extraordinary products are the lifeline of every tech-company, whether young or mature. Product managers can have a remarkable impact on a technology company’s ability to develop great products.
The role of a product manager is really challenging and very complex. An effective product manager is an entrepreneur, tactician, technical visionary, cross-functional team leader, customer and end user advocate, all rolled into one. In short, their primary role is to define the customer experience.
Product Manager is a communication hub, he talks to various stakeholders, users receiving the feedback and working at the metrics; he many a times acts as an enabler, to review what can be built and which is the most important feature, and in many cases he acts as blocker, e.g. stopping sales team to reach out to the team directly.
A product manager has two primary responsibilities:
- Defining a product to be built, and
- Managing its development, launch, and ongoing improvement.
To accomplish these responsibilities, a product manager leads a cross-functional team. Ideally none of the team members report directly to the product manager, hence it is correct to say that a product manager has substantial responsibility and not much formal authority.
A product manager’s domain will be dependent on the nature of her /his company’s product line. Many product managers are solely responsible for a single product. However, some product managers oversee one of several components of a complex product (e.g., algorithms to learn without human assistance which collects data that informs the machine learning engine, behind the scenes and refreshes it for Netflix). Others manage a set of correlated products that share common components or customers (e.g., Olx’s offerings for online merchants). Product manager may also be responsible for strategic initiatives that cut across multiple products, for example, improving growth, customer retention or expanding internationally.
Types of Product Managers
Product managers are broadly classified into 3 main categories:
- Internal Product Managers: These Product Managers are sometimes part of a team called Internal Tools, or something like that. They and their teams usually build tools for other people in their company organization. They build these tools for use internally as opposed to building for some general user or customer out in the public. A really good example of an Internal Product Manager is one that works with their team to build a piece of software that says the company’s support team uses to reset passwords or change account information for users. The stakeholder is someone internally. It’s the person that’s using that piece of software.
- Business to Consumer Product Managers: Business to Consumer Product Manager. What does a Consumer Product Manager do? Consumer Product Manager tends to be more common, it just means you’re a Product Manager, where the product is for an average consumer. Some examples where there’s a lot of Consumer Product Managers are Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, that sort of thing. Consumer Product Management role takes a wide of range of skills to be successful, and as well a lot of vision and creativity.
- Business to Business Product Managers or SAAS Product Managers:This is a type of Product Manager that builds products at a company whose clients are other companies. Some examples of this are SAP or Oracle or Salesforce. Those products are designed to solve problems for other companies. At companies like this, the stakeholders or the people that the Product Manager is working with their team to build for are these other companies. This means that the Product Manager interacts a lot with the salespeople at their own company and needs to make sure what they build meets the business requirements of the businesses that they’re selling to. If you’re a B2B Product Manager, you’re going to be talking a lot to Sales teams.
To summarize, there are various categories of Product managers who help developing the product’s strategy and persuasively communicate it. They also ensure that all the decisions concerning development, marketing, etc., reflect and support the product strategy.
Kunal Jauhari 