What are the Key Responsibilities of a Product Manager?
Product Managers play an important organizational role in a modern technology company. I remember a decade ago when people were asking me "what does a product manager do", often times they either simply gave me the blank stare or following up with "what do you actually do", when I introduced myself at social gatherings. If you look at the description of a job posting for a product manager, it typically lathers with the following: product vision, roadmap, requirements, pricing, go-to-market strategy, product launch, competitive analysis, and sometimes even more.
As a product manager in a company where management appreciates the importance of Product Management, you are often considered the CEO of the product you manage, and you bear the responsibility setting the product strategy, rationalizing and prioritizing roadmap, and creating requirements or feature definition for that product. Depending on the company's organizational structure, the position may also include forecasting, product marketing, profit and loss (P&L), and sometimes marketing responsibilities.
As modern technology companies grow in an accelerated pace, Product Management plays the critical role to make sure the product or sometimes features of the product is successful, generating revenue, adding new users, or creating the buzz in the market. The product manager analyzes market and competitive conditions. You need to lay out a differentiated product vision that delivers unique value based on customer demands. As the CEO of your product, your role spans many activities from strategic to tactical. You also need to provide cross-functional leadership, bridging gaps between different functions and departments, working closely with development or engineering teams, sales and marketing, and support.
You are responsible for the ‘why’, ‘what,’ and ‘when’ of the product, defining them so that the engineering team will build, the sales team will sell, and the support team will support.
Here are the core responsibilities of a Product Manager, and you will be held accountable for successfully delivering these: strategy, ideation, releases, features, go-to-market, and pricing.
Strategy
You need to clearly articulate the business value across the organization. With the strategy, you need to define the product roadmap and work closely with development and engineering to build what's on the roadmap.
Releases
Before actually development begins, you need to plan for what your teams will deliver and when they will deliver it. It does not matter if the development group uses waterfall, agile, phase gate or any other development methodologies.
Ideation
Product managers own ideation -- the creative process of generating, developing, and curating new ideas. The keyword here is creative. Ideas are abundant and a successful organization needs better ideas, but it is a hard job to manage and prioritize them. As a product manager, you need to collect, analyze, and promote the most relevant ideas into features. The ideas that will achieve key objectives for the product and company. Product managers also need to have a solid feedback process so that critical items can be successfully integrated into the planning and development processes.
Features
Requirements definition, and what features goes into releases to deliver a complete product to market and lead the development team to success. This is the rewarding part of the job as you will have the opportunities to interacts with customers and prospects, but it is also the tedious and mundane part of the job, as it takes time to gather, curate and distill so that the development team can build it.
Go-to-market (GTM)
You have made the decision on what to build, and worked hard with the development team to build it, now it's time to educate the whole organization so that they are better armed to articulate the value, sell to prospects, and support customers. You need to work with cross-functional teams to launch it to market.
Pricing
You have articulated the vision, worked with team to build the product, along the way based on market research, you need to decide how much the product is worth to customers, what's the pricing model, SaaS or perpetual licensing, margins and other aspects related to the financial success of your product.
It's the most challenging job as the CEO of your product. You need to be inspiring, leading teams with influence, and are able to sell it to the organization and the market. It is challenging, but it is most rewarding. You need passion, focus and commitment. Launching successful products is invigorating. Following the right process, doing the right things and seeing the success, you will have the best job in the organization.