What Does a Product Manager Do?

This is a GREAT question, because an individual with the “title” of Product Manager can do very different things at different organizations. Even though the individual responsibilities may vary from organization to organization, the Product Management function within an organization is consistent, and can be broken down into three major areas of responsibility.

The Product Management function within an organization is responsible for the Strategy, Development and Delivery of Value to an organization’s customers.

But what does that mean?

1. Product Strategy – Is the process of determining WHAT do build

2. Product Development – Overseeing the actual development of the product features, and functions, and

3. Product Delivery – includes the process of not only delivering the product to your customer, but also measuring if what you built truly delivers value to them.

Let me explain each of these areas of responsibility for you in more detail.

Product Strategy

The first major area of responsibility a Product Manager has, is to determine what needs to be built. 

Currently, in 2024, if you have the “title” of Product Manager, your responsibilities may be more focused on prioritizing what to build and communicating what decisions were made about what to build via a Product Roadmap. In many organizations, the real decisions about what to build comes from Executives, Business Unit leaders, or the Sales organization. These types of companies are what Marty Cagan author of Empowered, Inspired and Transformed, calls output oriented, or feature focused organizations.

However, we are starting to see Product Strategy responsibilities shifting more towards Product Managers. The reason this shift is occurring is because multiple studies have shown that 70% - 80% of features that are built are never or rarely used. Too often, under the current output oriented, feature focused model, a specific feature or function may have been needed to close a sale, or keep a customer, but after that, research shows, the feature is not used, or not used by the majority of customers. This Product Strategy simply is not working.

Now, in 2024 there is a new focus on developing a Product Strategy by clearly defining the product vision and using quantifiable metrics, to determine what to build. Understanding who your primary customer persona is, and ensuring your organization is solving real problems for your customers, solutions they find value in, and are willing to pay for, is becoming more and more prevalent as a skill needed for Product Management roles.

Product Development

The second area of responsibility, and the most well known area of responsibility for a Product Manager is overseeing the development of the features and functions of a product. This includes creating a prioritized Product Backlog of individual features that need to be built, documenting these features in smaller incremental pieces of value, or User Stories, Refining the stories to ensure the development or engineering team clearly understands these needs, and finally, ensuring that what was developed, meets a certain set of acceptance criteria that are intended to ensure value is delivered for your customer.

This is where different software development methodologies come into play. Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe are all considered “Agile” methodologies and contain a set of processes a team follows to guide them through their understanding and development of the product features.

The challenge for anyone interested in getting into Product Management or growing their career and becoming a leader in Product Management, is that focusing on the skills associated with the Build phase of product management is no longer enough. Over the past several years we have seen major employer’s layoff thousands of Product Managers. Why, because the “role” of Product Manager was too focused on only one area of Product Management, that was the Development phase.

To be successful and grow your career as a Product Manager, especially if you want to be a leader in a product organization, make sure you are developing your skills in Product Strategy, Development AND Delivery.

Product Delivery

The third area of responsibility a Product Manager is Product Delivery, which includes not only typical Go To Market activities, but also, and more importantly, measuring the value of the features you have built. This measurement should determine if the feature truly provides value to the customer and your organization, which is typically measured in the form of an Organizational Key Result or OKR, such as generating revenue for the organization.

In the past, it may have been enough to measure if a user clicked on a “Learn More” button if it was in position A or position B, aka A/B testing. But today, to effectively manage a product, you need to understand if clicking on that button is truly delivering value. Too often organizations have spent a lot of time and money executing different A/B tests to determine the optimal placement of a button on a page with no significant increase in value. If your product has millions of users this can have a significant impact, however, if you have 100’s or 1,000’s of users, a simple test or two would be enough to see if the placement results in an increase in revenue or decrease in churn (a simple measure of value).

Today we are seeing a renewed focus on ensuring features provide value and value is measured via Organizational Key Results. So make sure as part of your Product Discovery phase you are also defining a clear OKR for your product.

Summary

To recap, What does a Product Manager do? They:

1. Conducts Product Discovery to determining WHAT do build by identifying WHO the key user personas are, and identifying the product features that deliver the most value to customers and value to their organization, by ensuring these features help your company achieve some organizational key results such as increased revenue or decreased churn.

2. A Product Manager manages the Product Development phase the product by utilizing software development methodologies such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, and SAFe.

3. A Product Manager ensures the Product Delivery provides value by validating the product or service they delivered. achieves an organizational key result.