Type product manager jokes into Google, and the SERP actually turns up lists of product manager witticisms. Some therein are even funny! But most come at the expense of the product manager (PM).
If you’re new to working for a tech company, you may be wondering about the product manager’s role. Which brings us to one of the jokes:
Q. What’s the hardest part of being a product manager?
A. Explaining what you do to your parents.
Slight on the PM aside, this gets at the fact that the cross-functional PM role is a little difficult to nail down. It comes in all sorts of flavors, and can look quite different from company to company and from individual to individual. Product managers may have any of a number of prior roles on their resume. These include engineer, subject matter expert in the relevant field or general project manager. Head count ranges from many to none. Larger companies have lots of product managers to cover an array of its products. Smaller companies may have just one. And early-stage startups may not be able to afford any at all.
So let’s sort out some of the common themes in the product management role.
Product manager as bridge
In most cases, the product manager can be considered the bridge from the business side of the company to the product side. It’s the PM’s responsibility to create a roadmap of the features the company will build, with the timeline for doing so. He or she may also manage the processes for hearing from customers, as well as how the developers will schedule their work to make the roadmap happen.
On the business side of the bridge, the PM uses a variety of methods to stay informed about customer needs and other big-picture goals (such as sales).
Product manager as listener
How does he or she keep the ear to the ground? This could include informal conversations with customers or more formal processes such as customer surveys or focus/user groups. The UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) design and CX (Customer Experience) teams will collaborate on this work.
The PM may also gain intel from customers and prospects via the sales team. Others on the executive team such as the CEO, too, may have opinions about features to build or new directions to take, based on what they’re hearing from investors or in the market.
Product manager as keeper of the roadmap
Many PMs will use a SaaS tool to receive input, prioritize, and build a roadmap. There are dozens of these in the market, and those on the business side who just need a place to submit their feature requests will find them easy to use. The PM will use this tool at a more detailed level to organize the input, prioritize it, and develop a plan for execution. Some of these tools dovetail with a project management system (such as Jira) that the development team is using, and the PM may be highly involved in managing the engineers’ process.
By nature, the PM’s role as a middleman or bridge, puts them in what can be a tricky position where they need to arbitrate the needs of one area of the company with another. For example, the sales team may have a client that wants a particular feature. But the PM’s research indicates this would not be used by many clients. The PM must let the sales team know the company will not build it. Conversely, occasionally a feature may not be of the highest priority, but the development team reports they can build it with little effort, so it may be prioritized sooner for a quick win.
Dev teams generally push software features out into the world in releases. Each release is planned to include a specific set of features. The roadmap, then, is an integral tool in planning this, a representation of what will be built for release, when.
Navigating short-term and long-term
In most cases, it’s useful to have several versions of the roadmap, one for short-term and one for longer-term. Short-term roadmaps are useful tools for the development team and internal use. Longer-term roadmaps are perfect for customers, prospects, and investors—those you don’t want in the weeds.
The short-term roadmap guides the day-to-day work of the development team. But stuff happens. Deadlines aren’t met. New features arise that jump the priority line. The longer-term roadmap keeps all this in perspective with broader brushstrokes, so that short-term can be adjusted, while the company can still keep moving towards the larger goals.
Having a solid understanding of the product manager’s role is integral to everyone in a company. Still, it’d probably be wise to refrain from telling a product manager joke. 😉