What is the product manager's job?

Perhaps because the concept of a product is too broad, product management is the hardest job to define in all organizations. The author has discussed the issue of "product manager's job" with some friends who are involved in product management or are ready to develop further in this field. Here, I would like to share some of these elements with you, and welcome you to discuss them.

First I want to define "team", and the team I'm referring to is two groups, one is a narrow team, that is, for a product or a certain aspect of a product (peripheral design, engineering design, quality control, etc.) and directly work together a group of people; such as marketing department, Legal department and administrative Department.

What the product Manager does is:

Help the team (and the company) create the right product for the user

Let's take this sentence apart to see:

Help Team

The best product managers always know which tasks are the highest priority and spend all their time ensuring that their teams are dealing with these tasks.

Mainly, this consists of the following two aspects:

Coordination – Team work effectively together with clear goals and priorities

Communication – so that internal members have a thorough understanding of the various aspects of their work (goals, time, reasons, etc.). This is especially important for teams in rapidly changing environments.

Many people compare product managers to the CEO of a product or to a rule-makers, which I disagree with, because it exaggerates the actual power and influence of the product manager. A good team should share this right and responsibility, and everyone can make suggestions and improve the status quo. In turn, good product managers should be able to do so by actively listening to their members ' opinions, and they should also be responsible for discovering problems, breaking the deadlock and unifying team intentions. So, it's not that product managers don't have their own ideas, but that they don't override the mission and collective needs that the organization gives them. A good product manager should be adept at enabling his team to bring the collective wisdom into full play in the decision-making process.

From a practical standpoint, this kind of responsibility often becomes the summary meeting record or the preparation obtains the team approval product plan. Don't underestimate it. Summing up the work, I have found more than once that writing a good meeting report is often more time-consuming than meeting itself. Most of the time, you also need the cooperation of a broad team-that is, getting feedback and advice from other parts of the organization to remove the potential obstacles that might hinder the implementation of the plan. On Twitter, we call this collaboration with a broad team called Act SOLID (overall action).

In a product team, engineers are responsible for programming, designers are responsible for packaging, and product managers often do not have any tangible works. But in my opinion, the team's success is tied to the product manager's job satisfaction.

Help the Company

Understanding the overall goals of the company and the macro-level role of the team in achieving this goal is a product manager must do. As far as I'm concerned, good designers are the best in this area – they always work with the company vision as their coordinates and help their teams do the same.

This sense of belonging to the ultimate goal of achieving the organization's vision and the coordination with other teams is extremely important. A good product manager will clearly let team members know that they are working as part of an organization. The success of a small team is a building block for a larger team. Therefore, during the interview process for the product manager, I often look for words such as "Company", "founder", "Vision" or "CEO" that convey macro vision.

As mentioned in the previous section, this is not to obliterate the existence of individuality or innovation, but to ensure that individuality and innovation serve the goals of the organization rather than replace it.

Build Products

Product creation is ultimately the reason and goal of the product department. A good idea and design if the product can not be translated into reality is just a pile of waste paper. Good product managers know how to strike a balance between "doing well" and "doing well". A good team should always be in the loop of testing, collecting early feedback and improving, in order to be as close to the impeccable as possible when delivering the product to the user (which is, of course, a state that will never be reached). This means making the necessary compromises, and the product teams with clear goals and familiarity with user psychology and needs are good at doing so, and the team is the best product manager to achieve this.

The right product

Mediocre product managers let his team produce products, and good product managers let his team produce the right products. The latter is adept at gathering information from feedback and early user experiences to determine whether the product meets the needs of the target group, and also through communication with the high-level to ensure that the product conforms to the organization strategy.

Another important responsibility for product managers is to work later in the product market. Product managers should work with their teams on measuring metrics and customer satisfaction, and take pains to extract effective parts from massive amounts of information – what makes users happy and what disappoints them, to get into the next improvement cycle.

User

The best product managers know from the user's point of view, understand the needs of users cry, but also understand the identity of the user to participate in the product development process. It is very difficult to achieve these points without a deep understanding of the target group. At the same time, good product managers must also think of ways to listen to the user's voice – whether through product trials, direct talk, email or network information, or with other teams responsible for gathering information.

Ultimately, this information should be served to "build the right product", the ultimate goal of the product team.

In short, there is absolutely no perfect product, so the process of product development, testing and improvement will never stop, and the product manager's job is to take his team to complete this cycle smoothly.

The author of this article, Josh Elman, has been responsible for the work of the product department in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Slightly censored.