Defining the role of the product manager is not an easy task as the Product Management field is always evolving.
The following are some universally accepted interpretations of the role of the product manager, as well as clever, unusual and remarkable perspectives from top professionals in the industry.
The ‘UX — Tech — Business’ trifecta
Martin Eriksson is the co-founder and curator of Mind the Product, the world’s largest product conference and also the creator of the most ubiquitous explanation of the PM’s role.
If you are a PM, I bet you have seen Martin’s ‘UX — Tech — Business’ Venn diagram at least one hundred times.
Product management is the intersection between business, technology and user experience.
In Martin’s own words, a good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners in all.
When desirability and usability meets feasibility
Following the same line of thought, Marty Cagan, author of Inspired, described the job of the product manager as to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible.
He speaks about 4 big risks that the product manager has to tackle early:
- Value risk: whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use the product.
- Usability risk: whether users can figure out how to use it.
- Feasibility risk: whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have.
- Business viability risk: whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business.
‘Win — Win Safeguard’: Creating customer value & business value
World’s finest Product Discovery coach, Teresa Torres, considers a product team’s job to create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business.
In other words, as product managers, while we keep a customer centric approach, we focus on creating forms of value that determine the health and well-being of the company in the long run. It’s important to notice that value for the users comes first.
Same, same, but different, Gibson Biddle, former VP of product at Netflix, expresses the same concept putting it in other words: the PM’s mission is to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways.
Avoiding waste
In one of the best product management talks I’ve ever been to, Duncan Steblyna, at that time VP of product at Naspers asseverated that as product managers we have a big responsibility: make sure we don’t build stupid shit.
Building a product is risky, the only way to be certain that a feature or initiative moves the needle of our desired outcomes is actually building it and releasing it to our users.
As PM’s we must put in place a process that helps eliminate bad ideas before they reach the development phase: a set of tools and principles that help validate our ideas.
Product Manager at large corporations
At large companies, specially those which are not natively digital, the product manager’s challenge variates between user impact and stakeholder management. If you have ever worked at a large company, you probably know what I’m talking about.
These big corporations are more likely to be ruled by Conway’s law: in 1967, a software developer called Melvin Conway, observed that any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
randy silver, co-host at the fabulous podcast The Product Experience interestingly states that as product managers our job is to avoid Conway’s law.
Put another way, making sure that our product is not a copy of our organization’s communication structure.
A new me
“Jobs to be Done” theory helps answering why do customers buy a certain product. When a customer buys a product, he is “hiring” it to do a particular job:
As Product Managers we should enable our customers to get a job done.
We believe that our product is what we sell, but it really is how our users feel with it.
Instagram helps us be better photographers.
Spotify‘s discover algorithm helps us be better music curators.
Headspace helps us be more focused at work and sleep better.
Role definitions are just ways to put in objective terms a complex reality, and they might not always be precise as they naturally emphasize a certain component of the whole.
I would love to hear what’s your favorite definition!
