What Does A Product Manager Do? | Product Manager's Comprehensive Job Description | Career Path 2021

Key Takeaways

over the next few minutes i'm going to go over the responsibilities of a product manager at a tech company a product manager job description includes two main responsibilities leading the product development and working with the stakeholders across the company to ensure that the product direction is aligned with the objectives of the company and to do their jobs right product managers sit across three main functional areas the consumer partners as we call it the user side the creation part or in the digital world is software development in the physical world it's manufacturing production and the business side which is a group of people that have come together to create a service in the hope for generating profit now although a product manager's job description changes from company to company the main responsibilities remain the same let's look at product managers responsibilities in more detail first one is leading product development at a high level product development is broken down into three sections problem discovery solution finding and product building these are the three main sections of product development product managers are responsible for all these three parts of the product development and depending on their level of seniority they focus on different parts of product development more than others junior product managers focus more on execution and product building since problem discovery and solution discovery are more strategic and need more some experience the difficulty usually reduces as you go from the top to the bottom if you know the problem you can find a solution and if you know the solution you can usually build it as product managers gain more experience they take more responsibilities by either growing horizontally meaning taking more responsibilities for additional features or parts of a product or growing vertically by taking responsibilities for problem and solution discovery of the feature or product they're responsible for and the more senior product managers become the more responsible they will be for deciding what themes of problems and solutions they should allocate resources on the best product leaders are great at discovering pain points that are not obvious to the rest of us and are also great at thinking creatively about solving these problems in ways that are 10 times better than existing solutions now let's look at the three steps of product development in more detail one problem discovery depending on the stage of the company and product life cycle product managers take different approaches to discovering problems each company is usually solving one big problem and each product manager within the company focuses on solving a subset of problems within that big problem the more senior product manager the more general the problem statement becomes for example google is solving the disorganization of data around the world the google maps head of product focuses on solving this organization of locations data and a more junior pm might be focusing on delivery of bike lane location data within the google maps there are different ways to discover problems sometimes it's by interviewing your target users to learn more about their past experiences an example could be you ask them tell me about how you went about booking your last vacation another way of discovering problems is by looking at your clients wishlist although it should be used very carefully sometimes wish lists do not actually match with the reality of what is needed so you can use other sources such as surveys and market research it can be observing users interaction great product managers also know that most user interviews do not reveal everything because users don't always realize they have a problem imagine you asked someone in year 2005 what problem they had with their phone most would not have told you that they like like access to the internet from anywhere at any time but observing how users gained access to the information you could realize lack of constant access to the internet at your fingertip was a big pain point so this step is sometimes conducted as part of a market research or study where product managers closely monitor and study group of users and their interactions with the products and alternatives and the product itself another way is looking at the performance of existing products and behaviors by leveraging the data and analytics a pm can discover behavioral patterns and friction points and user behavior or it could be market development let's say there's news for example you find out that your competitor released a new feature and sometimes they have no choice but to match their offering and prioritize certain features just to stay relevant to your market after discovering the problems a pm usually estimates the severity of the problem and there are different ways to do this some of the more popular ways are like market research user feedback like market testing like create a call to action and see how many people click on it prototyping and user testing and in many cases product managers are so knowledgeable about their industry and know their users so well that they know the importance of the problem without doing much research the next step is finding solutions this is the part where product managers determine how they solve a problem there are different ways to go about finding solutions sometimes product managers work with product designers or ux designers sometimes you're at the product manager or responsible for finding solutions and sometimes when it's an engineering solution you must work closely with the engineering team once the pm determines a way to solve a problem they estimate the work involved in developing the product with the engineering team the problem and solution discoveries are the ongoing responsibilities of a product team and product managers use problem discovery and solution discovery to develop a product roadmap and backlog for the product development tasks the product backlog is set of features and capabilities that the pm will be developing in the future the backlog management roadmap development usually requires some effort and collaborations within the team so it does take some of the product manager's time now junior product managers need to ensure that their roadmaps and backlogs are approved by more senior product leaders in the product team and meet their long-run strategy and more senior product managers also need to make sure that it's aligned with the company's strategy also remember that in many cases product development prioritization management have many dependencies and require buying from multiple teams this is especially true in larger teams let's say you're updating a mobile banking app by enabling mobile check deposit you need to ensure that all stakeholders from banking legal compliance securities marketing are aligned and their opinions are taken into consideration in product development in smaller companies however a pm works directly with the ceo and they have more autonomy in their decision making process now you might ask how do you know if your proposed solution is any good that's a good question and there are different ways to answer it sometimes it's market research sometimes as user testing sometimes prototyping and observing how users interact with it but it's important to measure the effectiveness of the solution to ensure that the solution to the problem does not create bigger problems and big consumer tech companies like facebook pay a lot of attention to various metrics to make sure that their iterations do not have a negative repel effect in other parts of their product for example if the problem for facebook like is user's lack of ability to see the like icon quickly making it bigger might not be a good solution because it might negatively reduce attention to other parts of the product and now the third part of product development is building the product once you know how you want to solve that problem and i've decided to prioritize it you work with the stakeholders to develop detail requirements for the product or feature that you want to build if it's a simple consumer app you might only need to engage with a ux designer and engineering team to build a product for more complex products you'll be working with a larger team of stakeholders to ensure that what you're building takes everyone's feedback into consideration in this phase you or someone else in the organization will write a document that helps product managers and the rest of the building team let's say engineering and ux designers have clarity on what is expected to be delivered and here are the three most common documents that are written about a product before it is built you don't have to have all three of them but depending on the size of the project the bigger it is the more documents will be created product requirements is the first one it describes the objective of the product why it's being built how it's being built the timelines and etc the second one is the technical specs this document is usually written by the engineering team and discusses the engineering aspect of the product building and the third one is user stories the user stories are generally written by the product manager or engineering team as a way to break down the delivery of the product into very small deliverables that can be easily tested and verified to be completed an example of a story is as a facebook user i should see your login credentials are incorrect message if i enter email address and password that do not match with a login credential in the facebook database once the engineering and the product managers have developed the user stories there's usually some testing and qa process to ensure that the development was done according to the standards described in the documents after development is completed the person responsible for qa and testing varies depending on the size of the team and the team culture sometimes the product manager is responsible for testing in larger teams there is a dedicated qa team who is responsible now it's important to mention that no matter how much research and planning is done there will be things that come up that might require product manager to change their plans and adjust them accordingly and examples of some of these things could be for example engineering team realizes that a previously agreed upon path for building a feature is hard as to consider a different solution to the problem that has been agreed upon to address or the team comes across edge cases that have not been thought of before for example enabling mobile deposit checks it's not easy because people usually don't have clean lenses or like they take blurry pictures or you realize that engineering needs some more clarity on the scope of the project or the product roadmap to make the right engineering decisions today the best product managers are able to work closely with all teams and adjust their plans as new information is coming this is really important for product managers to do now let's talk about working with company stakeholders as the person responsible for the product you have to ensure that the company stakeholders are aligned with the product direction and understand the perspectives of the product team on various areas so part of your job is usually spent on communication working with non-functional teams across the company in the end a product manager's job changes every day and it's different depending on the company priorities new information coming in from the teams the market and the company resources and that's what's so exciting about a pm job it changes every day if you are interested in becoming a product manager subscribe to my youtube channel and visit my website at productmanagementexercises.com which is a community of over 20 000 members who are helping each other prepare for their product manager job 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