What a Product Manager Actually Does in a Technical Organization

A product manager’s role in organizations is varied and largely depends on the needs, size, stage, and market of the company. Ask ten people what a Product Manager does, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. Sure, there’ll be similar themes of managing the product development lifecycle, but the day to day realities of PMs differ per organization.

Some think Product Managers write requirements. Others think they manage developers. Some assume they are just project managers with a different title. In reality, a Product Manager sits at the intersection of business, technology, and users, and their job is to ensure that what the team builds is both useful and viable.

We’ll be focusing on what a Product Manager, does in a technical organization, and we are going to look beyond the job description and the title.

Problem Definition

Product Managers don’t just manage what is being built, or even what should be built. Instead, they first operate at a deeper level: What problem is worth solving?

Product Managers collaborate with stakeholders to understand their vision of what is to be built, and then cross-reference it with the real market need or customer feedback. They ask questions like: What problems are users having? What are the opportunities from solving this problem? How aligned are these solutions with the organization's goals?

This prevents teams from building features that look good but deliver no real value.

While I was leading product development at a print company, my stakeholders wanted me to build a design studio as a feature on our application. According to my user and market research, I realized that the demand for that feature wasn’t enough to justify the resources to be allocated. It posed a solution to a problem users were having, but it wasn’t the solution they wanted. After giving stakeholders that information, it was decided that the project should proceed; however, adoption was quite low,, and the problem wasn’t adequately solved.

This is one of the reasons why Product Managers are critical in defining the problems to be solved in any tech-reliant organization.

Technical Communication

A Product Manager is the bridge between the business team and the engineering team. Business stakeholders speak in goals, outcomes, and numbers such as: increase revenue, improve retention, reduce customer acquisition costs. The engineering team, on the other hand, speaks a totally different language. They ask question like: what APIs are we building, what feature are we optimizing, what’s our benchmark click count etc. 

The Product Manager acts as the translator; they break down high-level goals (epics) into simple user stories, and then into engineering and design tasks. They define the acceptance criteria for the tasks.

Without this critical translation, engineering teams will be lost, and business teams will be frustrated. The communication isn’t just one way either; the PM is responsible for explaining the achievements or pain points of the engineering team to the business team. They bridge the gap between vision and implementation.

Prioritization 

In any organization, there are always more ideas than resources. Founders have grand visions, every department has a list of features they believe will make their work easier, customers have requests that will improve their user experience, growth and marketing have verticals they want to explore. There are a lot of great ideas to move the business forward, but limited resources.

The Product Manager is primarily responsible for maintaining the product backlog and deciding the sprints. This means they decide: what gets built now, what gets delayed, what gets dropped entirely.

In the section above on problem definition, we explored how to correctly define the problem and their solutions. Product managers ensure that the solutions to be built will have the most impact and align with business goals.

Product Managers have to say “no” more often than not. They have to maintain a scale of preference and assign weights and urgency to tasks. They have to make trade-offs. Without this strong prioritization, teams become busy but ineffective. Product Managers ensure effort is focused where it matters most.

Validates Ideas

Just as we explored in the section above, not every idea deserves to be built. Product Managers validate ideas through: user research, interviews, prototypes, data analysis, etc. 

They go further to define an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to further validate the feasibility and impact an idea will have on the business. All this is done to ensure resources aren’t wasted on ideas that won’t have an impact.

The validation of ideas doesn’t end when the idea is built. After release, Product Managers track usage, measure outcomes and gather feedback to ensure that the long-term and short-term goals of building the product are being met or are on track. A Product Manager reduces risk by testing assumptions early and learning continuously.

Technical Team Alignment 

People tend to underestimate how easy a technical team can become misaligned, and how expensive that misalignment can become. Even after business goals have been translated into tasks and user stories, there are still sub-teams in the engineering team that need to understand the requirements of each task. The UI designers may understand one thing, while the backend developers have another understanding entirely of the same task.

This can cause a lot of friction during building and negatively impact the productivity of the engineering teams. A PM clarifies the scope and ensures the expected outcome is well understood by each member of the engineering team. They define the acceptability criteria for each task.

Product Managers ensure the technical team moves in the same direction.