What is product management (PM)?

Frankly, there are so many articles on this that do a way better job of describing this elusive role than I can. I will share a short list of resources that do a great job defining it, but in short, here is my view:

Product Management is the set of behaviors, actions and impact required to make a product/feature/business/process successful. It could simply be defining the vision, roadmap and feature set of a product and navigating trade-offs as they come along. It could be doing customer research if you do not have dedicated UX (user experience) researchers or consumer insights teams. It could be doing coding to grab metrics of a feature if your engineering team has no bandwidth after just creating and debugging the key features. It could be setting and managing the schedule of a program if you do not have a technical/program manager on your initiative.

As you can see, this makes it awfully difficult to define product management succinctly 🙂 Thankfully, these folks have done a pretty decent job of it:

• This is a great article from the Blacks In Technology site
• This article really breaks down the PM process as well as how PM came to exist – pretty interesting stuff
• This presentation by the senior director of product management at Google Nest does a great job of explaining product management

Check out this post for a choose-your-own-adventure to product management!