What is Product Management?

I’m going to kick off this series of blog posts on the general topics of product management, product marketing, go-to-market strategy, pricing, etc by discussing a fundamental question: what exactly is product management? 

This might seem like a simple question, but I have found that many people don’t really know what PMs actually do – and that what a PM does at one company may be very different than what they do at another company. Many product organizations don’t even have a role called “PM,” but you can bet that someone is doing the job. Or people think that PMs don’t actually do anything useful, as wonderfully satirized in Office Space: https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=iZJtr8NZv0rSMdix

With that in mind, a core PM function is in fact to work with customers and bring their requirements to Engineering: what the movie intentionally glosses over is that the “specifications” aren’t just a sheet of paper that is handed over. We’ll get into that later. But PM is more—way more—than just a “translation” function between the market (customers) and the builders (engineering).

If you were to ask me for a formal definition of PM, I’d probably say something like this:

“Product Managers are responsible for ensuring the success of the products they own, from conception to implementation and all the way to the day the last instance of that product is discarded.” Sounds like a pretty big job, and also like it would overlap with a lot of other areas—like Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Support—and the answer is yes, and yes. There are generally clear boundaries between what PM does and what those other departments do; the rules of the road, so to speak. But these vary from company to company, and even from team to team. And note that the word “success”, as used here, isn’t well defined: growing revenue would be a good metric, sure, but what about a late-stage product that is in decline? Or a product that has served its usefulness and just needs to be gracefully brought to end-of-life?

When I first started my career in Product Management, I was sent to a training course by a company called Pragmatic Marketing (now called Pragmatic Institute). They’re still around, and in their training you learn a lot about PM functions like creating use cases and prioritizing Market Problems. But one of the key elements that stuck with me, and that I still use to this day, is their visualization of the Product Management job function as a framework made up of many different blocks organized in a sort of grid. You can download this from their website (https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/product/framework/ ) if you are curious, but generally the idea was that the grid’s left-to-right columns represent different product lifecycle phases, from initial research all the way through to supporting in-market product. And the cells in each column represent different PM job functions from understanding the Competitive Landscape, to building Use Scenarios, to creating (marketing) Content.

All of which is interesting, and looking at the job functions Pragmatic came up with gives you some ideas, but the key insight is that the Framework represents all possible job functions (well, some are missing, but more on that later) for PMs generally…. but that each individual PM role at a given company may or may not include any given job function. For example, the Framework includes a box for Content: at a smaller company, the PM may indeed create the product marketing content or collateral, but at larger companies there may be a dedicated Product Marketing role that does that specific job. Or similarly there’s a Presentations & Demos block, but Sales Engineers may take the lead in creating product demos at some organizations. The point of all this is that the PM role involves many functions, all of which support a product from how it is conceived to its ongoing support post-sale, but that at any given company some of those job functions may be delegated to other departments or individuals. 

Now that we have that covered, what do PMs actually do (most of the time)? Assuming you don’t want to go take a PM training course, here’s my summary:

1. Understand the external market, which products already exist in the space, how they work and how they are sold. What ideas, resources, and technologies your company has available (or can acquire) to create or improve your own product(s) for the space.
2. Understand the market of buyers, and recommend how your company can reach those buyers through distribution channels (direct, resellers, distributors, etc). Define the product portfolio and packaging you intend to deliver and the roadmap plus timeline for doing so.
3. Define a business plan to achieve product goals, including where technologies will be acquired from (internal development and innovation, acquisition, licensing, etc), what costs are involved, and how the product should be priced and sold.
4. Understand product buyers and product users and what they want, and therefore how you will position your product features to meet their needs. Develop use scenarios and requirements to guide the team creating the product(s).
5. Build plans for how your product(s) will be marketed and how you will acquire and retain customers. Create detailed launch plans and provide thought leadership to gain the attention of the market. Generate and track leads, and build sources of referrals and references. Work with industry analysts so that they understand your strategy and your products.
6. Build out the sales process and supporting resources such as pitches, unique selling points, collateral, website content, and other sales tools. Make sure Sales (and your partners’ Sales) understands how to access and use those resources, what the products are, and how they work.
7. Support Sales for sales escalations and client calls. Support marketing efforts such as conferences, events, and webinars. Support partners in their sales efforts. Craft customer communications to explain your policies, product issues, product lifecycles, etc.

That’s quite a list. As we’ve discussed, the good news is that it’s not always PM’s job to actually execute on everything in the list above; sometimes you just need to work with Marketing, Engineering, Sales, or Support, and they’ll take it from there. And some of the things above you only do occasionally, like laying out the portfolio of products you intend to sell and making minor updates from there on out. I’ve highlighted the things that I think most PMs actually spend the bulk of their time doing, or at least where I personally spent my time as a PM in the companies I have worked for.

This blog post is already getting a bit long, so I’ll leave it there. The details of how this all works in practice is something that we could go almost infinitely deep on, and I’ll create more posts in future in specific areas. If you have something you’d like to share, or are curious about, feel free to comment on this post and I’ll either answer you directly or perhaps write a post on it soon. Thanks for reading!