A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality. Fluid blocks. A product manager is someone who is responsible for the strategy and blueprint for a product or product line. They are the person who defines the ‘why’, ‘what,’ and ‘when’ of a product, and clearly communicates the business value to the product team so they can understand the purpose behind the new product or product release. Product manager jobs at larger companies such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon are usually very dynamic. Product managers can be involved in a variety of unique projects—they’re often subject to a family of apps, software, and products. Therefore, product managers at tech companies like Facebook are usually much more qualified and knowledgeable. A product manager is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product (both physical and digital products), specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features.

• Product Manager Examples
• Product Manager Jobs
• Product Manager Interview Questions
• Product Manager Salary
• Product Manager Certification

There’s a lot of confusion around product management job titles, seniority, and hierarchy. This makes it hard to compare jobs, plan your career, and attract the right talent to your team. A standard is emerging from most successful product teams and organisations that can serve as a template for your own:

Product Management Career Ladder

Associate Product Manager

This is an entry-level position, for someone who is brand new to the role. It also has a specific connotation with an associate product manager (APM) program. This is a common rotational apprenticeship program in larger companies like Google and Facebook. The typical APM is a recent graduate. The aim — similar to most apprenticeships — is to develop these candidates into full-time positions through a combination of training and hands-on involvement with real projects.

Junior Product Manager

A junior product manager is also new to the role but doesn’t require as much hands-on training as an associate product manager. They operate independently with a product development team, maybe on a smaller product or area, and under the leadership and mentorship of a more senior product manager. A junior product manager typically has some work experience under their belt already and can come from any background. Engineering, design, or business are the most common backgrounds. Some of the best product managers out there have come from customer support, QA, or business analyst roles.

Product Manager

The most common job title of a product manager can span a wide gamut of experience, responsibility, and skills. Broadly this is someone who operates independently, leads the work of a product development team, and is responsible for a product or customer journey. Because it’s the most common title, it’s important to consider what product they manage. For example, if they’re a product manager for Facebook’s news feed and impact billions of users, they’re probably more senior and experienced than a product manager at a brand new startup.

Senior Product Manager

A senior product manager does the same thing as a product manager but has a senior title either in recognition of their contributions, the relative importance of their product, or reflects the fact that they also spend time mentoring junior product managers. In some organisations, this is a hybrid role. The Senior Product Manager is hands-on with a product and also has some line-management responsibilities.

Product Lead / Lead Product Manager

This is a newer role, and usually a very senior product manager who is responsible for a critical product in the company. This can be equivalent in rank to a Senior Product Manager through to a VP Product. The difference is they are not managing other product managers at all — they are simply exceptional product managers who want to stay hands-on and leave people management to others.

In many ways, this is similar to the Architect track in engineering (in contrast to the CTO track), and something we should encourage more. Just because you’re a great product manager and want to advance in your career, it doesn’t mean you should have to move away from being a hands-on product manager to a leader of other product managers. Some people are just better suited to one path than the other. Recognising who is great at leadership and who is great at building amazing products is equally important and valuable to an organisation.

Product Director / Group Product Manager

A Product Director or Group Product Manager is where the role starts to change. It goes from an individual contributor who owns a product and works hands-on with engineering and design teams, to someone who has stepped back from the day-to-day to focus on leading other product managers and working on alignment. This is where soft skills around people management become a critical part of the job — managing people is even harder than managing products!

VP Product / Head of Product

This is similar to a Director, but common in larger companies with more products and management layers, or as the most senior product person in a startup. This role is all about managing other product managers. Additionally, a VP will usually be responsible for managing a team budget — some organisations even throw in P&L responsibility.

In many startups, this is called a Head of Product but I’m not personally a fan of that title as there’s no way to promote a Head of Product — they’re already the Head!

CPO / Chief Product Officer

A Chief Product Officer is the most senior product person in an organisation. They usually manage more than one team of product managers and represent product in the C-suite or management team. They’re responsible for overall product strategy and alignment within their teams and with other parts of the organisation.

The difference between a VP Product and CPO in smaller companies isn’t huge, and the title is used interchangeably for the most senior product person in the company. But in larger organisations that have both roles, we can again borrow from our engineering friends to clarify the difference. The VP Product is responsible for the team, the processes, and getting things done, while the CPO is responsible for the product vision, product architecture, and overall organisational alignment.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Most companies don’t need all these tiers of course, so it’s important to think about how this fits into your organisation. At a startup, you may well just have a single Product Manager, and then as you grow, a couple of Product Managers who report to a Head of Product/VP Product. Only as the company grows and the suite of products grows do you need to consider more layers. As with anything else in product, these team structures and tiers should be aligned with customer needs. This way, you can incentivise and organise teams in alignment with your company goals.

Product Owner ≠ Product Manager

Product Owner is a job role that came out of Agile and Scrum, and although many organisations use it as a job title that is interchangeable with Product Manager, it’s not correct. In Scrum, the Product Owner is defined as the person who is responsible for grooming the backlog. While in Agile it’s defined as the representative of the business, and neither entirely describe the full breadth of a Product Manager’s responsibilities.

Product Owner is a role you play in an Agile team, whereas a Product Manager is the job title of someone responsible for a product and its outcome on the customer and the business.

Now a lot of Product Owners out there are great Product Managers, and they should just change their title. But a fair number of Product Owners have simply completed a certified Scrum product owner course and now think they’re equivalent to a Product Manager. Doing so sets them up to fail as they never consider the broader role. So if you’re tasking a Product Owner with the broader product management responsibilities, make sure you provide the training they need to master the full breadth of the role (and then change their title).

Structure = Clarity

Having clear and common structures for product management job titles in our teams will help us all better understand our careers, roles, and teams. This structure should provide the right foundation for you and your teams to ask: Do your team’s titles accurately reflect their jobs? Are they clear enough that applicants looking at your open vacancies know what you’re hiring for and if the job is for them? Or do you need to rethink your structure to maximise clarity?

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A product manager is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product (both physical and digital products), specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features. They coordinate work done by many other functions (like software engineers, data scientists, and product designers) and are ultimately responsible for the business success of the product.

Product managers traditionally resided in the marketing organizations of technology companies, but have since additionally become staples of engineering and even product-specific teams.^[1]

Definition[edit]

A product manager considers numerous factors such as intended customer or user of a product, the products offered by the competition, and how well the product fits with the company's business model. The scope of a product manager varies greatly, some may manage one or more product lines and others (especially in large companies) may manage small components or features of a product.

In the financial services industry (banking, insurance etc.), product managers manage products (for example, credit card portfolios), their profit and loss, and also determine the business development strategy.

The term is often confused with other similar roles, such as:

Product Manager Examples

• Project manager: may perform all activities related to schedule and resource management
• Program Manager, sometimes known as Technical Program Manager (TPM): may perform activities related to schedule, resource, and cross-functional execution
• Product owner: a popular role in Agile development methodology, may perform all activities related to a self-encapsulated feature or feature set plan, development and releases
• Product marketing manager: responsible for the outbound marketing activities of the product, not development and cross-functional execution

Product management in software development[edit]

The role of the product manager was originally created to manage the complexity of the product lines of a business, as well as to ensure that those products were profitable. Product managers can come from many different backgrounds, because their primary skills involve working well with customers and understanding the problems the product is intended to solve.^[2]

A product manager is responsible for orchestrating the various activities associated with ensuring that a product is delivered that meets users' needs. A software product manager's role varies as the software moves through its lifecycle; earlier in the development process the product manager meets the intended audience of the product to engage in requirements elicitation,^[3] whereas later in the lifecycle the product manager's primary focus may be in acceptance testing of the product. Throughout all the stages of the product development process, the product manager represents the needs of end-users, evaluates market trends and competition, and uses this information to determine what features to build. For example, a product manager may decide a feature is needed because users are asking for it, or because the feature is needed to stay competitive. In order to facilitate this decision-making process the product manager may set out a vision for the product or a general framework for making product decisions. The product manager also ensures an atmosphere of cohesiveness and focused collaboration between all the members of the team, all in the interest of driving the product forward.^[4] Product managers are often thought of as sitting at the intersection of business, design, and technology.

Product Manager Jobs

Within an agile software development environment, similar responsibilities are taken on by a product owner, a project role that can be performed by a product manager which is the corresponding role in an organization. While the product manager has a strategic and long-term perspective with a strong focus on the market success of a product, a product owner aims to maximize the business value of the product or increment created by an agile project which can include benefits within an organization and does not explicitly relate to a product's marketability.^[5] Therefore, a product owner focuses mainly on the development of a product while a product manager has a more holistic perspective. Another difference is the time-focus of both roles: a project is time-bound which limits the responsibility of a product owner role in a project to the time frame of a project. A product manager role, in contrast, requires a long-term perspective and often does not imply any expiration at all. The role of a product owner in a project can be performed by a person with a product manager role in the organization which can help ensure a successful implementation of strategic considerations during the operational development of a product.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a product owner/product manager within an agile project include creating and prioritizing the product backlog, which is a list of things to be done by the development team, in order to maximize the business value created by the project.^[6] The product backlog is often made up of user stories, 'a placeholder for a conversation between the product manager.. and the development team.' These are brief narrative descriptions of what a feature should do, including a checklist of items that are required to be in place in order for the feature to be considered done, called the acceptance criteria. The details of how the feature is developed are worked out by developers and designers. At the end of the development sprint, the product manager is responsible for verifying that the acceptance criteria have been met; only then is the work on the feature officially done.^[7]

Product manager career progression[edit]

Product Manager Interview Questions

Product managers often start their careers as engineers or specialists in other functions and eventually transition to product management. Increasingly, though, large technology companies are hiring and training young graduates directly through programs like the Google Associate Product Manager program or the Facebook Rotational Product Manager program.

Rms driver. Product managers undergo a structured interview process, often a mix of case-based product strategy interviews, analytical interviews and more traditional behavioral interviews.^[8]

In most organizations, product managers have no direct reports: they 'lead through influence.'^[9] As individuals grow in seniority, they eventually take on managing other PMs, under titles like 'Product Director', 'Director, Product Management' or 'Group Product Manager'.

Notable individuals[edit]

Because of the broad responsibilities, product management is often seen as a training ground to C-level leadership roles in technology companies.^[10] Notable individuals who have held the role of product manager include Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Marissa Mayer (former CEO of Yahoo!), Premal Shah (president of Kiva.org), Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Kevin Systrom (founder of Instagram).

See also[edit]

Product Manager Salary

References[edit]

1. ^Cagan, Marty. Inspired: how to create tech products customers love (Second ed.). Hoboken, New Jersey. ISBN978-1-119-38750-3. OCLC1008765305.
2. ^Greg Geracie (July 2010). Take Charge Product Management. Greg Geracie. pp. 16–17. ISBN978-0-615-37927-2.
3. ^Zieliński, Krzysztof; Szmuc, Tomasz (2005). Software Engineering: Evolution and Emerging Technologies (2nd printing. ed.). Amsterdam: IOS Press. pp. 215. ISBN1-58603-559-2.
4. ^Greg Cohen (2010). Agile Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Creating Winning Products with Agile Development Teams. Happy About. ISBN978-1-60773-074-3.
5. ^'Product manager vs product owner - what is the difference?'. Project-management.info. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
6. ^'What is a Product Owner?'. Scrum.org. Retrieved 2019-10-18.
7. ^Greg Cohen (2010). Agile Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Creating Winning Products with Agile Development Teams. Happy About. p. 57. ISBN978-1-60773-074-3.
8. ^'What you need to know before your Facebook PM interview'. teamcandor.com. Retrieved 2019-04-17.
9. ^'Influence Without Authority'. General Assembly. Retrieved 2019-04-17.
10. ^Haden, Jeff (2017-04-17). 'Want to Be a Great CEO? Be a Great Product Manager First'. Inc.com. Retrieved 2019-04-17.

Product Manager Certification