Product Managers as the Team’s Glue
Based on the passages in the book, I think that the product manager’s job is one that is highly unstructured and based on the company that they are at, but as a whole, they serve as the glue for the team’s various functions. They are responsible for ensuring that the team meets project deadlines and that everyone on the team is accurately working towards the vision that is set for the project. They also serve as the bridge between the user’s needs and the project goals. Based on various data points, they define the strategic goal for the team and ensure that it is successfully executed.
Leadership without Micromanagement
Despite their overwhelming responsibilities, it seems important for product managers to not get too stuck in the weeds while working on a project. In most cases, they cannot be the ones physically designing or coding the project in most cases. Thus, successful product managers are motivators and leaders, but not micromanagers; I think the book made a pretty interesting parallel between product managers and the people who lead class projects. They need to be good at orchestrating tasks and ensure that the people successfully complete those tasks.
Lessons from My Travelers Internship
My perception of a product manager’s job is shaped from my time as a product management intern at Travelers Insurance as a freshman in college. In the insurance world, product managers are largely responsible for evaluating and deciding on strategic decisions based on the insurance product they are selling and not quite as involved in the implementation of the decisions like product managers at tech companies. Product managers at Travelers served as the glue for the team responsible for the decision, interfacing with customer success, sales, data science (this is unique to insurance), finance, and compliance teams to get reasonable buy-in for product changes. Once they received the buy-in for the decision, they would pitch it to senior leadership, who approved or rejected the change based on their perception of it.
Questions for the Author
I have a few questions for the author of the book. First, I am curious whether they would agree with the description of a product manager as being the glue for the team. Also, I am interested to hear their thoughts on the role of AI in product management. Does the author think that AI will increase or decrease the role of product managers in an organization? On one hand, it can be argued that product managers will both strategize and implement product decisions due to AI-assisted coding, whereas others could argue that this role will be taken on by software engineers.
