What Is Product Management? 7 Duties of a Product Manager

Product management refers to a development process encompassing all aspects of the product life cycle. This can include deciding on an initial product strategy, brainstorming new product ideas, settling on target markets, setting pricing, and anything related to product marketing, creation, and improvement.

Keep in mind that product management and project management are two different things. Project management focuses only on mapping out the logistics for building a given product or project; product management entails developing those product or project ideas in the first place and constantly taking in customer feedback to improve them.

Product managers oversee the entire product life cycle and development process. They brainstorm new products, seek to improve current ones, and attempt to maximize efficiency and profitability at their companies. Product managers need to understand their customer base and how a wide range of different teams can work together to please that base with new products and new iterations of old ones. A product manager must empathize, create, and lead a team.

Product managers generally begin working on product teams in associate-level positions before promotion to a managerial position. Sometimes they transfer into the profession from other similarly managerial jobs. While you don’t necessarily need a degree for this position, having one may open doors for you. You can also generally use “product leader” and “chief product officer” as interchangeable titles with product manager.

Product managers juggle multiple responsibilities throughout their jam-packed days. They must possess the technical skills necessary to develop products, the people skills to interact with multiple teams, and the managerial skills to get those teams to work together and hit the go-to-market goals for any given product. Here are just seven ways product managers might use their product development skills throughout their workweeks:

1. 1. Assessing business metrics: Product managers know how to adjust their market strategies based on incoming business metrics. They weigh their value propositions against new customer data to see what their consumer base craves and then strategize accordingly. The product development process unfolds by studying these metrics to see how new products can boost interest in and profitability from what the company sells.
2. 2. Brainstorming new products: New initiatives and methodologies for delivering exciting new products should be at the forefront of any product manager’s mind. In a general sense, they need to help build a brand persona and product vision to entice consumers to stick with their goods and services. More specifically, they brainstorm ways to better tailor product design and usability to their consumer base. This helps them decide on which product requirements are necessary and which are expendable.
3. 3. Conducting user testing and research: Through customer interviews, market research, and general feedback, product managers gradually gain a better perspective on what their customer base likes and dislikes about their current products, as well as what new products they hope the manager’s company will develop for them. Interacting with customers in a meaningful way is a huge component of the product management role.
4. 4. Facilitating teamwork: Product managers work with a wide array of stakeholders and team members throughout companies. They often need to coordinate with computer science professionals, user experience or UX designers, business executives, and other professionals at their companies. Learning to manage a product team can often mean learning to, by proxy, help manage a software development team, an engineering team, and a sales team, too.
5. 5. Improving existing products: Great product managers focus on improving their old products as much as developing new ones. They should constantly strive to get better at messaging and develop helpful new features no matter the type of product. This keeps current product owners happy and generates positive word-of-mouth feedback to get new consumers interested in a company’s goods and services.
6. 6. Planning a product roadmap: Building a step-by-step template or framework to develop new goods and services is a fundamental aspect of the product manager role. This still allows for creative decision-making while maintaining a core product planning workflow that remains in place from one sprint to the next. Sometimes managers will update this roadmap to better accord with budget needs, specific product-market fit, and other factors.
7. 7. Prioritizing problem-solving: Product managers often have a backlog of pain points they need to address about their products in development as well as those currently on the market. The role of a product manager is to meet customer needs by consistently solving problems like these. They often need to do so while managing multiple different product lines.

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