What Is a Product Manager?
A long answer to a short question.
“What is a Product Manager?” is a question that comes up almost every time someone asks me what I do for a living. My answer usually begins along the lines of “Well, the easiest way to explain it is...” which makes sense when you read Google’s definition of Product Management:
“Product management is an organizational function that guides every step of a product's lifecycle — from development to positioning and pricing — by focusing on the product and its customers first and foremost”
So, if we attempt to rephrase that definition, a Product Manager oversees everything related to a product, by prioritizing all aspects of said product while thinking about everyone who uses it, all the time. Sounds like a big job.
The next part of my answer generally goes something like “I work for an Ag-tech company and my job is to take super detailed field-level data and make it useful for carbon credit generation.” This usually starts to connect some dots for the asker as Ag and Tech are both industries that Midwesterners are generally familiar with and does a good job to frame the second part of the answer.
“I take x and make it useful for y” implies a gap between some input and a need from some other company or industry. That gap can be thought of as a problem to be solved and the product would be a solution to said problem. So, breaking down my specific response into a generalized format would sound something like “I create solutions for industry-level problems” and this response sounds a lot like the job description of an entrepreneur.
Traditionally, an entrepreneur was a person who recognized a gap in the market, invented a solution to solve for said gap, figured out a way to sell that solution at a price that was greater than the cost to produce it, and finally figure out a way to profitably scale that solution (or go bankrupt trying). In other words, a person who “guides every step of a product's lifecycle — from development to positioning and pricing — by focusing on the product and its customers first and foremost.” Sound familiar?
So, if a Product Manager is effectively an entrepreneur, why not just tell my new acquaintance that I’m an entrepreneur? The difference lies within the ownership of the product. Entrepreneurs generally own the company who produces said product and therefore own all other responsibilities associated with business ownership and operation. Product Management is a distillation of the entrepreneurial skillset that, through specialization, can optimize the development cycle and iterative customer feedback loop that drives product improvement and market success without the burden of also managing the associated disciplines of engineering, accounting, sales, production, etc. necessary to deliver that product to market and operate the associated business.
This delineation makes sense when overlaid against the corporation-dominated landscape of the modern global economy and the highly specialized workforce of knowledge workers necessary to create highly technical and nuanced products. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on things like operating capital and investor relations.
This means that Product Management is the distillation of the entrepreneurial spirit, optimized for fast-paced, iterative development necessary to compete, at scale, within a global market, and without the burden of a highly attenuated and multi-disciplinary skillset necessary to found, scale, and operate a multi-million-dollar company. This corporate affiliation also hedges the product manager against the risk of failure and catastrophic financial loss but at the cost of extreme financial gain as they are no longer the owner of the product they have created and nurtured to broad-scale success.
Bringing this all the way back to my hypothetical, “what do you say you do here” conversation, the best way to describe what a Product Manager does is act as a freelance entrepreneur playing with house money in exchange for a cut of the profits and some help operating the business.