Product Manager 101

Having worked in the tech industry for the last 10 years, I have performed a variety of roles including: Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Engineering Manager. I often get asked by colleagues and friends to describe the differences between the roles. Many often wonder whether they should switch roles, and how I decided to switch roles throughout my career. Given the frequency, I decided to write down my take, so others may benefit and use it to better guide their own careers. Below is my primer on the role of a Product Manager in a software company. The primer is organized from high-level responsibilities (the what) down to the low-level tasks (the how) required for competency. It is not an exhaustive list, but should set reasonable expectations.

Top Responsibilities

Product Vision

At the highest level, a PM’s main responsibility is creating a vision for a product and setting the direction for the team. The scale of the problem should scale with the PM’s ability (i.e. designing a feature within an app, to leading a company-wide initiative), but the overall responsibility is the same.

The vision is a description of a product that solves a business objective, by achieving product-market fit over a long time horizon - i.e. painting a picture of the future. Generating a vision requires foresight, a good understanding of the company’s positioning, a true understanding of the problem, and insight from research and analysis. However, writing down a vision is not enough. The next step is to drive alignment within the organization, by clearly articulating the proposal and getting agreement from upper management, as well as your team.

Which leads to the second part of the vision, the plan for how to get there, commonly referred to as the roadmap. The roadmap breaks down the long-term goal into incremental steps, describes how all the pieces fit together, calls out key milestones, and identifies metrics to track progress and validate assumptions along the way. The vision and roadmap cannot be static, they must adapt to the changing market forces and shifts in company priorities and resources. The roadmap should reinforce the vision and should inspire, or at least motivate, the team to get it done.

The further out you envision correctly, the more praise you will receive in terms of “visionary” and “genius.” The flip side is being treated like a crazy person on a drug induced vision quest. But success is only attained if the vision becomes reality.

Product Development

Product development is the crux contribution of a PM to the team, and the devil is in the details. It encapsulates the aspects of a product vision and roadmap, scaled down to the specifics of a feature, yet still relates back to the broader mission:

Doing the research and analysis to make data-informed decisions about what to build and why.
Setting product requirements by gathering information from users, design, engineering, and other stakeholders.
Driving consensus to get the feature built and defining success metrics for the feature itself.
Prioritizing the feature against other items on the roadmap.
Responding to data and feedback about the feature in order to make improvements.
Deciding what features make it into the product, when to run an experiment, how to handle edge cases, how to rollout the feature to users, and what factors would lead to further development (or deprecation).

Project Management

Project management is the day-to-day work required of a PM; the nuts and bolts of ensuring the team is able to execute on the roadmap. The PM must be responsive to team needs and unblock any stage of the pipeline that has become a bottleneck: whether it’s an edge case in the product spec that needs to be accounted for, making tough decisions, getting project support, or managing external team dependencies. Communicating progress is essential, and there should be active communication channels with all stakeholders, for each project. The PM is the first point of contact for all non-engineering stakeholders.

The PM should be holding project kickoffs and regular team meetings that cover the discussion of current project statuses, upcoming projects, the learnings and results of past projects, new ideas, team goals, and reprioritization. The PM is also responsible for driving clarity within the team around long term goals and how their projects work towards those goals. The PM should lead the team with motivation and building camaraderie, not authority.

Top Skills to be an effective PM (in MRU order):

Communication

A PM must be a skilled communicator across many different mediums, including: email, in person discussions, meetings, and presentations. A few keys to being a good communicator include clear and concise writing, fast response times, detailed explanations, and knowing who to loop into the conversation, and when.

Prioritization

There are many competing forces that demand a PM’s attention, and a good PM is able to sort through them and focus on the important things while eliminating distractions.

Analytical Reasoning

A PM with strong analytical skills and critical thinking can better prioritize and get to the solution faster. Backing up intuition with data and analysis is key to building a stronger vision. Invisible Asymptotes is a great example of product analysis.

Creativity

The instinct to build the right thing. Can you take product leaps that get you ahead of the competition, build competitive advantage, and accelerate the growth of your own product? Can you adapt to constraints and changing landscapes? Building a knack for understanding users, better yet, building preemptive solutions for users, is the mark of a visionary.

Closing Thoughts

Ultimately, the PM is judged on their team’s execution, not their individual ability, and is accountable to the results of the products they build. With a lot of product influence, comes a lot of responsibility.

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David ex Machina