What does a Product Manager do?

In simple words, represent the customer in the company.

Hello Curious Minds!

The role of a Product Manager in the digital/software/I.T. world seems to be very puzzling for many and intriguing for some! And why not? For the average Joe (and Jane) out there, a digital product is built by the techies, designed by the designers, and ‘sold’ by the marketing/business guys. Then what does a PM do? Why s/he is needed in the team at all?

The honest answer may baffle you — not every team/company needs a PM. If you are an early-stage start-up, the founder is the PM. S/he owns the product, has the vision for what the product should be, leads the strategy for that, gets it developed and everything trickles down from there. So, the founder of a start-up, which is still trying to establish itself, acts as the PM. There need not be a designation of a PM for him or her. Of course, there are other team-members supporting the founder-PM here as per their expertise — the software guys who code, the designers for UI/UX, the marketing guys and the business guys who sell (even this function may not be needed as the founder would be the first salesperson of the product).

So then who needs a PM after all?

The role of a PM comes into the picture, among other routes, when a company grows its business, there are multiple stakeholders, the software product needs to be upgraded frequently in terms of features, there is too much happening at the customer-end and everyone seems to work in silos without actually knowing why they are doing it — to solve what purpose!

Enter the PM.

The PM’s job is to be the voice of the customer in the company. You may have read this a thousand times. But it still remains relevant. Always. S/he knows the customer well, is clearly aware of the role the product plays in solving the customer’s pain points, is aware of the company’s vision, the market, and the business needs. The PM is that function which interacts with all stakeholders (technology, designers, business, analytics, marketing, etc.), understands and asks WHY something needs to be developed and shipped, once convinced ensures it happens and adds the value to the company and the customer as desired. The PM is that function which provides the direction when every stakeholder wants everything to be developed and shipped at the earliest (as it satisfies his/her KRAs) but perhaps fails to see what is important, and relevant, for the customer. The PM creates & co-owns the product vision and the roadmap for the company from the clutter of wish-list and feedback which comes from everywhere (remember — a good product idea can come from anywhere, from anyone). Easy-peasy, you say? Not exactly, read on!

The PM needs to understand who the customer for the product is — the demographics, the customer segmentation, the TG. There needs to be enough user-research done to validate if the product actually has a possible market-fit or not, what all should be shipped in the first version a.k.a. MVP, check out what competition is offering, etc. etc. Once convinced, s/he needs to convince the management/founders that this XYZ is what my customers need and these are the reasons why it will work — this may mean working closely with the business team as well. Once the buy-in is there, the PM needs to work very closely with the technology team to create and get the PRDs or user-stories into development as per priority, work with designers/UI/UX team-members to get the mocks into real screens which the users will love, marketing (and business team) for the GTM strategies which may make the product go viral, QA for the sign-offs for a bug-free release, Project Manager for the go-live date to honor commitments made to name a few. The tasks do not stop once the feature/product is shipped — the metrics have to be monitored to ensure the original goals are met, conduct user-interviews to get feedback on this, and then iterations for the next set of feature releases!

Not an impossible task, you may say. Surely not! But consider this. The PM is often talked of as the mini-CEO of the product. True — but only from a mindset point-of-view. The PM may be the only function that needs to act and get things done via influence and not authority! Imagine getting quality, timely work done without the team-members reporting into you. And that too is a jack of all trades and master of a few. Imagine being a salesman of your product vision to the engineering lead, a painter to the UI/UX lead, a storyteller to the marketing lead, a tough taskmaster to the delivery lead, a number-cruncher to the analytics lead and parse all this information in a very understandable manner to the c-suite! This, and more, is what a PM does. So, is s/he an expert in all of these functions? No! But does s/he understand all of these for a meaningful conversation, do justice to the product, and the customer? YES!

The PM is perhaps the only function that asks WHY are we doing this? What will it fulfill? And for whom? How do we know if we need to do this? And such ‘uncomfortable’ questions. Usually, many people love to jump to conclusions without understanding the problem statement well, without analyzing the implications, without the trade-offs in mind. The PM (ideally) does all this and more. S/he is the janitor and the CEO both, the owner of ‘whose responsibility is this? No answer?’, then the PM’s!

And in different domains and companies, the PM roles may differ as well. Some may want the PM to be highly technical oriented, some may want the PM to own revenue. Some may want the PM to work very, very closely with the tech team, some may want the PM to leave the ‘how’ of the tech totally to the tech team.

Adopting a cricketing term, the PM is the all-rounder. Why not the captain, I hear you ask? No authority! In a smallish company, the above roles may be played by founders or in some companies even by the Business Analyst, the Project/Program Manager/Coordinator, or all stakeholders going the extra mile to get these things done. Possible to survive without a PM in such a case? Hell, yes! Possible to take the correct decision most of the time ensuring the customer is satisfied and so is the business team, possibly no!

It is also possible that no one actually does anything that a PM does in some companies and things still work out. Very much possible. But it will not take a genius to check out the output product/feature and decode that there has perhaps not gone enough thought in this — maybe there was no PM?