What do product managers do? - Agile Coach

If you ask someone who worked on a product team about what does a product manager do, I'm pretty sure you're going to get a whole lot of different answers. It's 2019 and it is pretty amazing that you can still go to conferences or read blogs that still talk about what is a product manager. And over the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of product management tooling jobs and training just in that discipline. Hi, I'm Sharif Mansell. I'm an accidental product manager. I fell into product management from an engineering role. And over the last 10 years, I've seen Atlassian's product management team go from 10 to over 140 product managers. And I get to speak to a lot of our customers who, many of which are product managers as well, and I talk to them about how they do product management. And the truth is, there is no clear answer. Defining the role of product management is really complex and there are three reasons for this. First is product management has had a long history. In 2012, Ben Horowitz defined the role of a product manager as the CEO of a product. And that was pretty standard for many years. And what he was getting at was the responsibilities of a product manager. Everything from motivating the team, defining the problem, and defining what success looks like. Since then, the product manager as a CEO analogy has been critiqued. As a simple example, a product manager doesn't really have any reports, so often they have to influence without any authority. I think both these views highlight different aspects of product management. The CEO view highlights the areas of responsibility, whereas the alternate view highlights the method by which a product manager can go through to achieve an outcome. So the second reason defining product management is difficult is, is because of team culture. Now, if we define team culture as how teams get work done, we all know this can look very different between team and team and change radically depending on the size of the organization. As a simple example, in a small organization, you'll see a product manager do whatever they need to do to get the job done, everything from research to analytics. But as an organization grows, you'll see them hire a dedicated team to do something like research. Now, on those medium to large organizations, a large part of the product management role is navigating that organizational landscape to get an outcome. And they're using the influence skills to drive prioritization, balance business and customer needs, and achieve an outcome that builds a great product. Now, the third area of confusion is around responsibilities. One topic that always comes up is this contrast between what a product manager does and what A product owner does. Now product managers in the traditional sense are responsible for defining the mission, the vision, the high level problems and what does success look like now. In contrast, a product owner's responsibility is taking that high level mission and vision and breaking it down into day to day activities that the team can run with. Whether it be defining requirements, breaking down into stories, or just managing the day to day backlog. So what we're seeing in the industry is that product ownership is actually less of a role, more of a responsibility. And product managers that do really well at scaling themselves empower their team members to wear that product owner hat. So another area that might confuse the responsibilities of product management is this famous Venn diagram Martin Erickson created a few years ago. He talked about the intersection of user experience, technology and business. And he said that product management sits right here in this intersection. So what was he talking about? A lot of people have interpreted this diagram as a project management function, someone who works between three departments and making sure that all their needs are met. But in reality, Martin was actually talking about one of the activities that product managers need to do every day, a really hard one. And that's making great trade off decisions. It's about balancing the needs of user experience, making sure that we build something that's feasible and at the same time building a business need. And the hard part, doing all of this while solving a great customer problem. So a product manager is responsible for a product and its success. Now first we talked about how this can mean they're taking on CEO like responsibilities, but quite often they're doing it in a non CEO like way, such as influencing, without any authority. So in small organizations you'll expect product managers to take on a wide range of responsibilities. But as teams and organizations continue to grow, you'll find product managers responsibilities shift to be more focused on what's essential to build an amazing product. And great product managers do this by giving the teams context, empowering many individuals in a team to take on product owner like responsibilities. And finally, product managers need to be amazing at making trade off decisions between business needs, user experience and engineering, whilst making their customer happy. Now I know you probably came here looking for a single definition of what a product manager does. Now the irony here, like many things in product management, is that there is no single right answer. It's not black and white, but rather many shades of grey.