What does a product manager do?
A couple of weeks ago, I was having an interesting debate with an engineer friend about the role of a Product Manager. His take was that unlike engineers who build tangible things, Product Managers don’t necessarily generate tangible artifacts (code, board design, etc.) and thus are less of a contributor to the success of the product. Now this was a valid assertion and as someone who spent the first 15 years of my career as an engineer before shifting to product management, one that I felt I was uniquely positioned to answer.
So what does a Product Manager do?
There are many hats that Product Managers wear but if I were to encapsulate all of it into just one thing, it is that we manage risk. So let us talk about risk and how we manage it.
Every product is a collection of risks. It is a bet that a company makes that its customers will embrace the product, such that the investment will offer the desired returns. Returns come in many flavors - it could be revenue, it could be profits, it could be market share, it could be platform growth and a combination of all of this and more. But ultimately it is a big bet. And when the company makes this large a bet, there are a slew of micro bets that are made in turn.
Requirements
When a Product Manager writes the product requirements, every one of them is a data driven bet that a customer will see value in a capability or product feature. No product is perfect. The features that ultimately ship are a collection of risky bets, large and small. Some bets pan out. Others don't. And until customers vote with their wallet, every one of those features is a risk that a PM gets to own and manage.
Learnings
Through the life of every program, there are new learnings that validate (or invalidate) existing assumptions. And as those learnings kick in from past products, products in market, competitor products, and user research, the risk profile changes. The inherent risk in a product is never the same. It is always in a state of flux, varying through the product development lifecycle. And as the risk profile changes, the PM helps the organization and the team make rapid adjustments.
Asking the right questions
Product Managers don't have all the answers to what customers want. They rely on data and more importantly, throughout the development, focus on asking questions to refine the product hypothesis. The idea is to ask the right questions to facilitate the right discussions with the right people to arrive at the right conclusion. Ergo, understand the risk and make the best possible call as a team, given the variables. We talk in terms of known unknowns and try to take a wild swag (blindly) at the possible unknown unknowns. All in the service of quantifying risk at any given moment.
When we price a product a particular way, it is a reflection of the risk that an organization is willing to take to set it at a particular point. It is a hedge against running the risk of overpricing (and thus not selling enough) or underpricing (and setting the roadmap up for hard tradeoffs).
Planning for the unknown
Eliminating risk is impossible. Planning for unforeseen events is also impossible (a year long pandemic induced WFH wasn’t on any of our bingo cards). Yet, as the pandemic roiled our product development milestones last year, we huddled every day to understand and assess the rapidly changing risk profile, not just of every single component from every single supplier but also the software deliverables of our internal teams and our developer partners. And the impact to customers and literally everything you can think of and more. Yet, we navigated through it all as one team and shipped a world-class best-selling product. Engineers and designers and developers and testers and sales people and marketers and PR teams and creatives and program managers and lawyers and supply managers and operations folk and many, many others actually helped ship the product. As a Product Manager, I partnered with all of those people and together, we helped the organization navigate the risk, every single day.
So back to the original point of what does a product manager do, we manage and own the inherent risk in a program and try our best to use data and all the collective knowledge in the team to figure out how to reduce risk at every stage. We communicate it frequently and regularly to all the stakeholders so when decisions get made, all those risks are taken into account. So the next time you meet a Product Manager, trust me, they are carrying a lot on their shoulders. They may not churn out all the cool stuff you do, but they also do their little bit.