Product management: an introduction to the product manager’s work and skills
Product management is an organizational role. You typically find product managers in companies that build technology-based products for customers—or even for internal use. The role evolved from brand manager, a position common in companies that make packaged consumer goods.
A product manager owns strategy, the roadmap, and the definition of capabilities for a product or product line. The job can also include marketing, forecasting, and reviewing profit and loss.
Table of contents
- A product manager’s work, from strategy to operations, includes:
- A brief history of product management
- Who is a product manager?
- Product manager job titles
- What a product manager does
- Skills a product manager needs
- Learning product management
- A closing word on product management
A product manager’s work, from strategy to operations, includes:
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Setting a vision and strategy that puts a distinctive product on the market, based on customer need and clearly different from competitors.
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Deciding what the product team will build and ship, with a prioritized implementation schedule. That includes creating a release plan, collecting customer feedback, and prioritizing product capabilities.
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Leading cross-functional teams—especially among engineering, sales, marketing, and product support. A key part of this work is sharing the product roadmap so everyone on the team knows what is coming.
A brief history of product management
The product management role grew out of brand management. It was first created by an advertising executive in New York. In 1931, Neil McElroy wrote a memo at Procter & Gamble proposing a “brand man” on the team: someone responsible for every aspect of the product’s brand, and accountable for the product’s success or failure.
The idea of product ownership sits at the core of product management today. McElroy wanted the brand manager to own the whole outcome—not just the words in the advertising copy.
Companies across many industries noticed. Over the next half century, many put the role into their org charts. They often called it consumer product manager. Technology companies adopted the same idea.
Brand-management skill spread through industry, and technology companies hired brand managers for their deep product knowledge and sense of ownership. Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble before he built one of the most successful software companies. He applied those skills in a very different field at Intuit. His goal was still to understand, deliver, and improve the user experience of software products.
The gap between engineering and marketing peaked in the 1990s. Companies such as Microsoft were growing fast, and growth brought new problems. Engineers had no process for staying in continuous contact with customers and collecting their feedback and concerns. They also had little time to plan with marketing and sales—the teams responsible for growing revenue. That gap kept widening, and the product manager role became more visible and more central in technology.
Good product managers take full ownership and measure their own success by the success of the product.
Who is a product manager?
A product manager makes sure every member of the team works in concert toward the organization’s commercial goals. The product manager is also accountable for the outcome of a product launch. There is no single fixed set of metrics and responsibilities for the role; they usually include generating revenue, engaging users with the product, and customer satisfaction. Some product managers focus mainly on product development, writing product detail, and guiding the development team. Others put more weight on sales and marketing.
It can look as if the product manager mostly does management work rather than work related to building a product. That is not true. They continuously work on the current product to improve it. They analyze available data, do market research, and watch industry trends with open eyes. In the end, the product manager decides what the finished product should be and how development and launch strategy should work.
Product manager job titles
Over time, product management became a specialized profession. Demand for experienced, professional product managers keeps growing. Different levels of experience created different roles with different responsibilities, from a junior product manager to Chief Product Officer. The average base salary for a product manager in the United States is $114,000 per year, and in some companies CPO compensation exceeds $1 million.
Chief Product Officer
The CPO usually reports directly to the CEO and owns all product activity inside the organization. They typically focus on setting overall product strategy, aligned with the vision and goals set by the CEO and the board. Sometimes the CPO also acts as CMO. In that case they own both marketing and product development.
Senior Vice President of Product Management
This product role, often called SVP of Product, is an executive level that reports directly to the CEO and, in practice, to other C-level leaders. The SVP leads a large group of product managers. They also work closely with leaders in engineering, sales, support, and marketing to make sure the organization is building the right product and moving toward company-wide goals.
Vice President of Product Management
This role, VP of Product, is more common in larger, more established organizations with a structured org chart. These people are executives: influential and accountable for the products the business is building. They work daily with teams across the company to keep the parts of the organization in tune with one another. The VP of Product usually sits in company strategy meetings and is an influential voice there. They sometimes also join conversations about being acquired or merging with another business.
Director of Product Management
A Director of Product Management usually reports to the VP of Product. In smaller businesses they report directly to the CEO. Director is a management role: it needs management experience and the ability to work with other executives across the company. A Director of Product Management must be able to paint a clear picture of the product vision and share it—with customers and with teammates. They also own defining new capabilities that create the most value for the business.
Group Product Manager
A Group Product Manager (GPM) leads and directs a product team responsible for a group of products. This is the most important non-executive role a product manager can hold. Day-to-day GPM work includes research, reviewing strategy, and product development. In most cases strategy is handed down from management. The GPM is responsible for implementing and executing that strategy.
Product Manager
The product manager owns strategy, the product roadmap, and defining new capabilities for a product or product line. The role works constantly with other teams. Marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss can also fall to the product manager at different times. They analyze the market and the competitive landscape so the company can ship something distinct from what exists. The work ranges from tactical to strategic. A product manager leads across teams and fills organizational gaps among engineering, marketing, sales, and support.
Associate Product Manager
This role, often abbreviated APM, is an entry point into product management and usually reports to a Product Manager or Group Product Manager. People early in a product career often start here. Sitting with experienced product managers, they learn everything from product fundamentals to leading a team. They also learn product design and development alongside more senior people. An APM’s work can include UI design, ideating and designing new capabilities, analyzing data, and improving the product continuously.
Product Owner
Some agile teams have both a product manager and a product owner. Instead of one person owning both inward-facing and outward-facing work, the role is split. The product owner is responsible for making the customer’s voice heard and for success in the market. As the customer’s representative, the product owner writes user stories and must be ready to answer questions about product detail.
What a product manager does
Several core product-manager responsibilities are shared across product roles. In most cases the product manager is responsible for understanding customer needs, defining and prioritizing new capabilities, and working directly with engineering to build them. Setting strategy and the product roadmap are inward-facing activities; bringing the product to market is an outward-facing one.
Knowing the difference between inward and outward work matters, because a strong product manager has a set of skills for each. Internal product management includes gathering information from customers, competitive intelligence, and staying current on the industry, alongside setting product strategy and managing the roadmap.
External product management includes marketing responsibilities such as product message and branding, customer communication, launching new products, advertising, public relations, and events. Depending on the size and structure of the organization, these duties may sit with one person, two people, or a group of product managers.
Internal / in-team activities required for product management
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Strategy and vision
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Customer interviews
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Specifying new capabilities and requirements
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Building the roadmap
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Release management
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Direct work with engineering
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Training sales and support
External activities of the product manager
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Competitive differentiation
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Product positioning
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Naming and branding
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Sales and distribution
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Product and customer analysis
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Customer communication
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Product launch
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Work with press and analysts
Marty Cagan, author of Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love, defines the product manager’s purpose as follows.
To discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.
Marty Cagan
On that basis, a product manager needs solid knowledge in three areas:
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Business
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Technology
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User experience
The first thing a product manager does is see opportunities to develop new products or improve an existing one by adding new capabilities. They need to stay current on industry events and trends so they can decide well when choosing whether to build a product or not.
Software product manager job description
On top of those duties, a software product manager must work with a range of tools to identify product need and user behavior.
That is because a software product often has hidden customers, and sometimes a large number of customers you cannot reach one by one—their behavior is observed remotely.
Skills a product manager needs
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Understanding the product and customer needs
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Knowledge of the relevant market
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An innovative outlook
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Strategic thinking
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Technical knowledge
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Professional communication skills
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Relationship management
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Understanding user behavior
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The ability to explain commercial and technical requirements to everyone on the team
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The ability to measure a product’s success
Learning product management
To learn product management you need experience across domains more than anything else.
You should have experience in production (in software, programming), marketing, finance, legal, human resources, general management, operations, and support.
Product management is therefore not a skill you pick up easily in a single class. It requires understanding the organization and the many-sided complexity of the product.
The book A Product Manager’s Survival Guide is a strong resource for learning this.
A closing word on product management
Statistics say more than 300,000 new products launch each year, and 85 percent of them fail. There are many reasons, but one of the most important is that many of these products are not ready for the market at all. That means ignoring one part of product development and over-focusing on others, which wastes money. With sound product management you can cut the chance of market failure by a meaningful amount.
How much does a product manager earn?
In Iran, a mid-level product manager’s salary starts around 6 million tomans and can rise to 25 million tomans in large, complex organizations. At the time of writing, the typical figure is about 10 million tomans.
What does a product manager do?
In short, the product manager’s work includes a strategic, long-term view through customer interviews, building a roadmap through direct work with engineering, and training different teams in the organization toward shared goals.
How do a sales manager’s and a product manager’s duties differ?
A product manager must in practice be a good seller and able to sell the product well to the end user—but that is not their direct job. A product manager paves the way for selling a product; execution sits with the sales manager.
What does a product development specialist do?
A product specialist learns product design and development alongside experienced people, and works on UI design, ideating and designing new capabilities, analyzing data, and improving the product continuously.
How do a marketing manager’s and a product manager’s duties differ?
A product manager must in practice be a good marketing manager: they should know the channels for introducing, selling, and marketing the product, choose the most efficient channel given the budget, and make the marketing manager’s job easier on product positioning.
What is the difference between a product manager and a product owner?
Product owner is a Scrum role, defined inside that framework, with specific duties and a clear place on the Scrum team. Product manager is a more fluid role, defined differently in every organization.
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