Section 1: What product managers actually do
The product manager's job in one page
Ask ten companies what a product manager does and you will get ten answers. Underneath the differences, though, the core of the job is consistent: a product manager is responsible for making sure the team builds the right thing, for the right people, for the right reasons, and that it actually creates value.
The three questions
Most product work comes back to three questions:
- Is this valuable? Will customers want it, use it and, if relevant, pay for it?
- Is this viable for the business? Does it fit the strategy, the budget, legal constraints and the way the company makes money?
- Is this feasible and usable? Can we build it with the time and skills we have, and can people figure out how to use it?
Product managers own the first two most directly and share the third with design and engineering. When a feature fails, it usually failed one of these questions, often because nobody asked it early enough.
What PMs spend time on
A typical week might include:
- Talking to customers and reviewing support tickets or data.
- Working with designers on how a problem might be solved.
- Clarifying requirements and trade offs with engineers.
- Updating stakeholders such as sales, support and leadership.
- Deciding priorities and saying no to many requests.
- Checking whether recent releases achieved what they were meant to.
What PMs are not
Product managers are rarely the boss of the team. Engineers and designers usually report elsewhere. That means PMs lead through clarity and trust, not authority. A product manager is also not the person with all the ideas. Good ideas come from everyone, especially from people closest to customers and code. The PM's job is to make sure the best ideas win for good reasons.
Our running example
We will work on a scheduling tool used by small clinics such as physiotherapists and dentists. The clinics book appointments, send reminders and manage cancellations. Leadership has noticed that clinics using the product still have many no shows and wants the team to "fix reminders". As you will see in the next lesson, the first job is to understand whether that is really the problem.
Your first exercise
Write down the three questions above and, for a product you use every day, answer each one for a recent feature it added. You will start to see product decisions everywhere.