Because I teach a course on product management at Harvard Business School, I am routinely asked “What is the role of a product manager?” The role of product manager (PM) is often referred to as the “CEO of the product.” I disagree because, as Martin Eriksson points out, “Product managers simply don’t have any direct authority over most of the things needed to make their products successful — from user and data research through design and development to marketing, sales, and support.” PMs are not the CEO of product, and their roles vary widely depending on a number of factors. So, what should you consider if you’re thinking of pursuing a PM role?

1. Product Manager Salary
2. Product Manager Responsibilities
3. Product Manager Job
4. Product Manager Job Description

A product manager’s day is filled with communication tasks: meeting notes, Slack conversations, wikis, presentations, training materials, and—the Holy Grail—your product requirements document. You will spend a lot of time writing. As the product manager, you are a repository keeper of all product knowledge. Product managers owning the day-to-day details of a product’s development is a common misconception. As we describe on our Product Management vs. Project Management page, this is the role of a project manager. Product management is a strategic function. This product manager sample job description can assist in your creating a job application that will attract job candidates who are qualified for the job. Feel free to revise this job description to meet your specific job duties and job requirements. Product Manager Job Responsibilities.

Aspiring PMs should consider three primary factors when evaluating a role: core competencies, emotional intelligence(EQ), and company fit. The best PMs I have worked with have mastered the core competencies, have a high EQ, and work for the right company for them. Beyond shipping new features on a regular cadence and keeping the peace between engineering and the design team, the best PMs create products with strong user adoption that have exponential revenue growth and perhaps even disrupt an industry.

Core Competencies

There are core competencies that every PM must have — many of which can start in the classroom — but most are developed with experience, good role models, and mentoring. Some examples of these competencies include:

• conducting customer interviews and user testing
• running design sprints
• feature prioritization and road map planning
• the art of resource allocation (it is not a science!)
• performing market assessments
• translating business-to-technical requirements, and vice versa
• pricing and revenue modeling
• defining and tracking success metrics

These core competencies are the baseline for any PM, and the best PMs hone these skills over years of defining, shipping, and iterating on products. These PMs excel at reflecting on where each of these competencies have contributed to the success or failure of their products and continuously adjusting their approach based on customer feedback.

Emotional Intelligence

A good PM may know the dos and don’ts of a customer interview, but the best PMs have the ability to empathize with customers in that interview, are tuned into their body language and emotions, and can astutely suss out the pain points that the product or feature will address. A PM with a high EQ has strong relationships within their organization and a keen sense of how to navigate both internal and external hurdles to ship a great product. Here’s a deeper look at how the four key traits of EQ, as defined by Daniel Goleman, relate to the PM role:

Relationship management. Probably one of the most important characteristics of a great PM is their relationship management skills. By forming authentic and trustworthy connections with both internal and external stakeholders, the best PMs inspire people and help them reach their full potential. Relationship management is also vital in successful negotiation, resolving conflicts, and working with others toward a shared goal, which is especially challenging when a PM is tasked with balancing the needs of customers, resource-constrained engineering teams, and the company’s revenue goals. Authentic and trusting relationships within an organization can lead to more support when additional funding is needed for a product or when an engineer must be swayed to include a quick bug fix in the next sprint. Outside an organization, these skills could encourage existing customers to beta test a new feature for early feedback or to convince a target customer to try the MVP of a product still in stealth mode. These relationship skills can also be what makes the difference between having irate customers because of a bug introduced into the product and those who say, “No worries, we know you’ll fix this!”

Self-awareness. PMs must be self-aware so as to remain objective and avoid projecting their own preferences onto users of their products. If a PM is in love with a feature because it addresses their own pain points — PMs are often super-users of the products for which they are responsible — they may cause a user to say they love it too, just to please the PM (“false positive feature validation”). If not self-aware, a PM may push to prioritize a feature they conceived even when all the customer interviews and evidence are stacked against it. This lack of self-awareness could derail more important priorities or damage the PM’s relationship with engineers, who may lose confidence in their PM when the feature isn’t readily adopted by users.

Self-management. Being a PM can be incredibly stressful. The CEO wants one thing, the engineering team another, and customers have their own opinions about feature priorities. Managing tight deadlines, revenue targets, market demands, prioritization conflicts, and resource constraints all at once is not for the faint of heart. If a PM cannot maintain their emotions and keep it cool under pressure, they can quickly lose the confidence of all their constituents. The best PMs know how to push hard on the right priorities, with urgency but without conveying a sense of panic or stress. These PMs also know when to take a breath and step away to regroup.

Social awareness. According to Goleman, the competencies associated with being socially aware are empathy, organizational awareness, and service. PMs must understand customers’ emotions and concerns about their product as much as they understand the concerns of the sales team on how to sell that product, or the support team on how to support it, or the engineering team on how to build it. PMs have to have a deep understanding of how the organization operates and must build social capital to influence the success of their product, from obtaining budget and staffing to securing a top engineer to work on their product. Finally, social awareness ensures the best PMs service their customers with a product that addresses their jobs to be done, which is ultimately what drives product-market fit.

(Read more about what Paul Jackson has to say about EQ and PMs here. And here’s an interview with Sam Lessin, former VP of product management at Facebook, who says he has “never successfully trained empathy.”)

Product Manager Salary

Company Fit

If the best PMs have well-developed core competencies and a high EQ, does that mean they are destined for success no matter where they work? Not necessarily. In fact, taking these skills and personality traits and applying them to the right company is what will ultimately guarantee success.

I have yet to see a standard job description for a product manager, because each role is ultimately defined by the size, type of product, stage, industry, and even culture of the company. If you possess the core competencies and high EQ needed to be a successful PM, the next step is to unpack who’s hiring and what they are truly looking for.

Here are a few of the key areas in which companies differ in what they want from a PM:

Technical skill. The type of product, who uses it, and the type of company will determine how technical a PM needs to be. For example, Google requires PMs to pass a technical skills test regardless of what product they’ll work on. If the company is building a SaaS CRM, there may be more requirements around experience with go-to-market and customer lifecycles than around how the product is built. By contrast, if it’s a data science product with machine learning algorithms and APIs, the role may require a lot more technical depth to not only understand how to build the product but also how to talk credibly with the customers who will use it. That said, having a basic technical understanding of what is under the hood and mastery of the tools that PMs use is definitely important for the role, anywhere it is. Colin Lernell has more to say about these necessary skills here. If you are an aspiring PM and are concerned that you lack the basic tech skills for the role, you might consider taking online courses such as the renowned Introduction to Computer Science (CS50) course offered by Harvard University or one of the many intro and advanced technology courses offered by The Flatiron School.

Company philosophy about PM. Every company has a different philosophy about the product development process and where PMs fit into that process. Below are the three most common types, with pros and cons:

• PM drives engineering.This is a “throw it over the wall” approach, where PMs gather requirements, write the quintessential product requirements document, and hand it off to engineering to spec out the technical requirements. Contemporary organizations may do this process in a more agile and collaborative way, but the expectation is that PMs know best about what customers need and engineering is there to serve.
  • Pro: Engineering can focus on coding without a lot of distraction; this tends to work well for Waterfall development shops with long lifecycles.
  • Con: Engineers lose sight of the big picture and do not develop empathy for customers, which can lead to a poor user experience. Often there are unhealthy tensions when technical debt and “plumbing” work needs to be prioritized over customer requirements.
• Engineering drives product.More technically oriented product companies (cloud, big data, networking) tend to be engineering-driven, where engineers are advancing the science in their domain and PMs validate solutions or create front end access points (UIs, APIs) to tap into this new technology. There can be a collaborative relationship and feedback loop between customers, PMs, and engineering, but typically PMs are serving engineering in these companies.
  • Pro: Breakthrough technology can offer customers things they didn’t even know they needed. VMotion at VMware was a great example of this. An engineer thought it would be cool to do, a PM figured out how to monetize it, and it became a billion-dollar game changer for the company.
  • Con: Engineers chase the shiny new thing, over-architect the solution, or iterate forever, seeking perfection before getting customer feedback. PM input on priorities is ignored, which sometimes includes the most basic needs of customers.
• The PM-engineering partnership.In these cases, there is a strong yin-yang between PM and engineering, with joint discovery, decision making, and shared accountability. Engineers join PMs in customer interviews, and PMs are in sprint meetings to help unblock tasks or clarify requirements. But the two roles respect the line where one starts and the other stops. PMs understand what’s being coded but don’t tell engineers how to code, and engineers have empathy for customers’ needs but leave the prioritization to the PMs.
  • Pro: A streamlined prioritization process that values technical debt and plumbing projects; better design processes leading to a more positive user experience; higher-performing teams with improved product velocity, quality, and, typically, happier customers.
  • Con: Breakthrough innovation may not get greenlit; time-to-market may seem to lag (though I’d argue that what’s released is far better aligned with customer needs and more likely to successfully scale).

I’m clearly biased in favor of the third type of philosophy about PM (as is venture capitalist Fred Wilson), as I’ve experienced all three and found the yin-yang to be most effective. But that’s not to say the others are notably bad — it really depends on what type of product you’re building, the company stage, and more. Regardless, when considering a PM role, the philosophy of PM at the company could be the deciding factor on fit for the role.

Stage of company. The role of the PM at a startup is far more likely to be responsible for “all the things,” whereas at a mature company their role will be more distinctly defined. (Banfield, Eriksson, and Walkingshaw’s book Product Leadership has a section that has a lot more detail on this topic.)

• Startup. Beyond discovery, definition, and shipping, PMs may also be responsible for pricing, marketing, support, and potentially even sales of the product. These PMs thrive in a scrappy environment and are comfortable with ambiguity and frequent changes to direction as the company works towards product-market fit and learns to operate at scale.
  • Pro: PMs are likely to be more involved with company strategy, get exposure to senior leadership and the board, are able to take more risks and make a bigger impact. They also have more influence and authority over company resources.
  • Con: There’s typically little to no mentorship, role models, or best practices within the company. (You may have to seek it externally.) Budgets are typically tight, and PMs may not have the requisite experience to succeed at some of the things they’re tasked to do.
• Mature company. The PM may have a narrower scope and have coworkers who handle pricing, go-to-market strategies, and so on. And they are likely to be part of a larger team of product managers.
  • Pro: PMs are more likely to have mentoring and role models, as well as development standards and best practices. Close association with an engineering team can create strong relationships over time, which is great for long-term impact and career growth. And if the product has market fit, there is an established customer base and performance baseline to work from, versus guessing until you get it right.
  • Con: PMs have less exposure to company strategy and are just one of many voices of the customer. They can get “lost” in the system and have to deal with more politics and tight budgets.

Founder/CTO/CEO relationship with PM. Especially in earlier-stage companies, it’s important to know how involved the founder/CEO/CTO is in the product process. If they are deeply involved, the PM role may play more of a support role, to flesh out their ideas or validate concepts with customers, versus conceiving and driving ideas of their own. This can be great fun for some PMs who enjoy partnering with founders and C-level executives and collaborating on the product evolution. But for other PMs, it can be very frustrating if they prefer to take more ownership of the product direction. It can also be challenging if the more technical founders or C-levels prefer working directly with engineers. This can leave PMs out of the loop or undermined (sometimes unintentionally), causing not just personal frustrations but delays. When considering a PM role that may work closely with the founding leadership team, be sure to find out their expectations of the PM function and decide whether this is the right fit with your interests.

There are, of course, many other factors to consider for any role, such as the type of product you are building (B2B, B2C, industry), the people with whom you’ll work, the overall company culture (diverse, inclusive, flexible work hours, remote culture), and, of course, the compensation and benefits. There are also lots of articles on hiring product managers to get perspective on what the hiring managers are looking for — I especially recommend my friend Ken Norton’s piece “How to Hire a Product Manager.” However, if you are striving to be a great product manager, consider all of the above before signing on to your next gig. Developing core competencies will be an ongoing activity throughout your career, and leveraging EQ will ensure a more positive experience. But where you work, how they work, and who you work with and for will ultimately determine your long-term success.

A product manager is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product (both physical and digital products), specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features. They coordinate work done by many other functions (like software engineers, data scientists, and product designers) and are ultimately responsible for the business success of the product.

Product managers traditionally resided in the marketing organizations of technology companies, but have since additionally become staples of engineering and even product-specific teams.^[1]

Definition[edit]

A product manager considers numerous factors such as intended customer or user of a product, the products offered by the competition, and how well the product fits with the company's business model. The scope of a product manager varies greatly, some may manage one or more product lines and others (especially in large companies) may manage small components or features of a product.

In the financial services industry (banking, insurance etc.), product managers manage products (for example, credit card portfolios), their profit and loss, and also determine the business development strategy.

The term is often confused with other similar roles, such as:

• Project manager: may perform all activities related to schedule and resource management
• Program Manager, sometimes known as Technical Program Manager (TPM): may perform activities related to schedule, resource, and cross-functional execution
• Product owner: a popular role in Agile development methodology, may perform all activities related to a self-encapsulated feature or feature set plan, development and releases
• Product marketing manager: responsible for the outbound marketing activities of the product, not development and cross-functional execution

Product management in software development[edit]

The role of the product manager was originally created to manage the complexity of the product lines of a business, as well as to ensure that those products were profitable. Product managers can come from many different backgrounds, because their primary skills involve working well with customers and understanding the problems the product is intended to solve.^[2]

A product manager is responsible for orchestrating the various activities associated with ensuring that a product is delivered that meets users' needs. A software product manager's role varies as the software moves through its lifecycle; earlier in the development process the product manager meets the intended audience of the product to engage in requirements elicitation,^[3] whereas later in the lifecycle the product manager's primary focus may be in acceptance testing of the product. Throughout all the stages of the product development process, the product manager represents the needs of end-users, evaluates market trends and competition, and uses this information to determine what features to build. For example, a product manager may decide a feature is needed because users are asking for it, or because the feature is needed to stay competitive. In order to facilitate this decision-making process the product manager may set out a vision for the product or a general framework for making product decisions. The product manager also ensures an atmosphere of cohesiveness and focused collaboration between all the members of the team, all in the interest of driving the product forward.^[4] Product managers are often thought of as sitting at the intersection of business, design, and technology.

Within an agile software development environment, similar responsibilities are taken on by a product owner, a project role that can be performed by a product manager which is the corresponding role in an organization. While the product manager has a strategic and long-term perspective with a strong focus on the market success of a product, a product owner aims to maximize the business value of the product or increment created by an agile project which can include benefits within an organization and does not explicitly relate to a product's marketability.^[5] Therefore, a product owner focuses mainly on the development of a product while a product manager has a more holistic perspective. Another difference is the time-focus of both roles: a project is time-bound which limits the responsibility of a product owner role in a project to the time frame of a project. A product manager role, in contrast, requires a long-term perspective and often does not imply any expiration at all. The role of a product owner in a project can be performed by a person with a product manager role in the organization which can help ensure a successful implementation of strategic considerations during the operational development of a product.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a product owner/product manager within an agile project include creating and prioritizing the product backlog, which is a list of things to be done by the development team, in order to maximize the business value created by the project.^[6] The product backlog is often made up of user stories, 'a placeholder for a conversation between the product manager... and the development team.' These are brief narrative descriptions of what a feature should do, including a checklist of items that are required to be in place in order for the feature to be considered done, called the acceptance criteria. The details of how the feature is developed are worked out by developers and designers. At the end of the development sprint, the product manager is responsible for verifying that the acceptance criteria have been met; only then is the work on the feature officially done.^[7]

Product manager career progression[edit]

Product managers often start their careers as engineers or specialists in other functions and eventually transition to product management. Increasingly, though, large technology companies are hiring and training young graduates directly through programs like the Google Associate Product Manager program or the Facebook Rotational Product Manager program.

Product managers undergo a structured interview process, often a mix of case-based product strategy interviews, analytical interviews and more traditional behavioral interviews.^[8]

In most organizations, product managers have no direct reports: they 'lead through influence.'^[9] As individuals grow in seniority, they eventually take on managing other PMs, under titles like 'Product Director', 'Director, Product Management' or 'Group Product Manager'.

Notable individuals[edit]

Product Manager Responsibilities

Because of the broad responsibilities, product management is often seen as a training ground to C-level leadership roles in technology companies.^[10] Notable individuals who have held the role of product manager include Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Marissa Mayer (former CEO of Yahoo!), Premal Shah (president of Kiva.org), Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Kevin Systrom (founder of Instagram).

See also[edit]

Product Manager Job

References[edit]

1. ^Cagan, Marty. Inspired: how to create tech products customers love (Second ed.). Hoboken, New Jersey. ISBN978-1-119-38750-3. OCLC1008765305.
2. ^Greg Geracie (July 2010). Take Charge Product Management. Greg Geracie. pp. 16–17. ISBN978-0-615-37927-2.
3. ^Zieliński, Krzysztof; Szmuc, Tomasz (2005). Software Engineering: Evolution and Emerging Technologies (2nd printing. ed.). Amsterdam: IOS Press. pp. 215. ISBN1-58603-559-2.
4. ^Greg Cohen (2010). Agile Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Creating Winning Products with Agile Development Teams. Happy About. ISBN978-1-60773-074-3.
5. ^'Product manager vs product owner - what is the difference?'. Project-management.info. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
6. ^'What is a Product Owner?'. Scrum.org. Retrieved 2019-10-18.
7. ^Greg Cohen (2010). Agile Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Creating Winning Products with Agile Development Teams. Happy About. p. 57. ISBN978-1-60773-074-3.
8. ^'What you need to know before your Facebook PM interview'. teamcandor.com. Retrieved 2019-04-17.
9. ^'Influence Without Authority'. General Assembly. Retrieved 2019-04-17.
10. ^Haden, Jeff (2017-04-17). 'Want to Be a Great CEO? Be a Great Product Manager First'. Inc.com. Retrieved 2019-04-17.

Product Manager Job Description