Product Management is important because building products is more complicated than ever. At the core, Product Managers focus on making sure that the team is building products that people want. Additionally, Product Management plays an important role in connecting and aligning all the relevant teams needed to build and launch a product.
There’s an infinite number of problems that could be solved. Product Managers identify and define problems for the team to solve while making sure that:
📌Product Strategy
📌Product Design
📌Product Development
📌Product Launch
Finding the problem
(Understand, Identify, Define)This is part of the core PM and is one of the most important things that a PM does. PMs spend a lot of time defining the problem for the team to solve.
Creating strategy
Once armed with an understanding of the problem space and opportunity, PMs can build strategies for how to solve the problem through the creation of their product.
Communicating
The best PMs ensure that the entire team is on the same page. This can be accomplished through a variety of different mediums like presentations and conversations.
All PMs write PRDs to frame the problem and document requirements for the solution.
You can test the effectiveness of your communication by asking people on the team "What are we building and why?" If you ask 5 people that question and get the same answer back from everyone the PM is doing a good job. If you ask 5 people and get 6 different answers back, the PM has more work to do
Coordinating development and launch
PMs are also responsible for coordinating the development and launch of their product across all the various cross functional partners involved (design, engineering, marketing, legal, support, etc). This doesn’t mean PMs do all the work; they facilitate conversations and help to remove blockers or things that might be slowing the team down. They also make sure that everything that needs to happen does actually happen.
Responding to new information
Things change all the time. PMs need to stay up to date with the latest information. Whether that’s from new insights from user research, results from an experiment, feedback from the support team, new product launch from a competitor.
Responding to fires
PMs need to be able to juggle multiple tasks and quickly switch focus when priorities change, (i.e. there is an outage).