I’ve had several conversations recently about the nature of product management and the role of product managers. One thing that kept coming to mind was an old post by Martin Eriksson, which defines the product manager as the person who sits at the intersection of UX, Tech, and Business.

Eriksson says that the role of the product manager is to:

• assess and articulate the needs of the user,
• understand business goals and constraints, and
• communicate requirements and prioritization to the tech team.

That’s a good starting point, but I wanted to add a few things to that description that have come out of my conversations with product managers and the people who work with them.

UX is not UI

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: user experience is not about the interface. It’s about the complete end-to-end experience of engaging with your company and your product. This is the part where the product manager observes the user and designs experiments to gain more insight, so that they can be the voice of and proxy for the user in internal discussions. Lean startup principles and customer development are two ways of thinking about how to collect those data and insights about what drives your customers. The product manager has to collect that qualitative and quantitative data and make sense of it in the form of a product strategy.

Vision

The product manager holds the overall vision for the product. That person must be able to guide the fine-tuning of the details without losing sight of the bigger picture of what the company is trying to build. Usually, this involves maintaining a product roadmap for internal communication.1 The goal is to help guide the team in the process of creating a high-quality product that achieves that vision without diluting that value. One of the most difficult parts of the product management role is saying no to good ideas. A lot of good ideas don’t add up to a great product. If you’re having trouble with ideas in isolation, try making it a strategic decision by choosing among choices instead of making a series of binary decisions.

All Together Now

The product manager also has an important role in coordinating between the development, design, marketing, and sales teams, as well as accounting and business development. Each of these groups speaks a different language – with different jargon and different salient variables and goals. The product manager is the ultimate cross-cultural communicator, speaking each language and translating among them. Building consensus and coordinating efforts across functions is critical to executing a strategic plan, and the product manager is responsible not only for coming up with the strategy, but also for seeing it through.

Bonus

On teams that use Agile, the product manager sometimes serves as the Product Owner, in the role as proxy for the customer or end user. While insights from the true product owner – the user – are key to setting strategy, the product manager is the one inside the building and available to give clear decisions about murky ideas. Those decisions aren’t necessarily always right, but they help the team avoid analysis paralysis.

One note here: the Scrum Master in Agile is the person who owns the Agile process. The product manager cannot effectively serve as the Scrum Master, because those roles have different priorities that often naturally involve some productive conflict, and that should remain a separate role.

Double Bonus

As the person who can most clearly articulate the problem you’re trying to solve for your customer, your product manager can be a great evangelist for your company. The fact that she has interactions with and an understanding of almost every part of the business is an added benefit. If you have a product manager who is a good public speaker, take advantage of it and put her out there. You will probably see extra benefits from giving her more time “out of the building.”

Product Manager Job Description

This got me thinking: if I was writing a job description for an exceptional product manager, what would I include? The following is my take on the skills needed to excel in this role. Feel free to commandeer this for your own purposes.

Experience with lean startup and customer development. Understand the customer, and not just by asking them what they want.

Ability to influence without authority. Much of the product management role requires coordinating among people who don’t report directly to them. Diplomacy and negotiation is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Previous P&L Responsibility – The product manager must understand business to the degree that he can understand the constraints, risks, and tradeoffs, and make educated bets with imperfect information.

Analytics and data – Qualitative data are great, but even more useful when they are not used in a vacuum.

Coaching technical teams – It’s critical that the product manager has some sense of what is easy and what is difficult for developers. Also required: being able to communicate what you want to the team and predict challenges the team might confront.

Technical Background – When you can speak your developer’s language (if not write it), everything goes smoother because you can skip steps by understanding technical limitations and complexities.

 

1. The internal caveat here is key. If you publish the roadmap, customers will see it as a promise instead of a flexible plan.