A product manager’s job truly encompasses so many different components all working in conjunction with each other, but more so what I think what was notable from the reading are the tasks that are not defined in the job description and instead inherent with the work that is being completed. Being a project manager means that you will be working with many different people working across the company from engineers to designers to HR leads and more. More so, depending on the size of company that you are working for, this role can differ greatly as well. At a small start up, you might be work on putting together product mock-ups, scheduling informal interviews to better understand user experience, etc. In medium size, you might be working more with designers, developers, and customer service to understand and build for user needs. In a very large organization, your role can often entail documentation of user stories and working more with large amounts of data and analytics to build for better products going forward.
I think this graphic as I think it displays many of the soft and hard skills that are needed as a project manager but even this list is not all encompassing of what the job entails. What also stood out to me about the reading was what this job does not entail. Despite the job description often including more than what was originally stated, I think what is noteworthy is that as the PM, “you are not the boss” and “you are not actually building the product itself”. What I really took from the reading is that often it might feel like you are intermediary bridging together multiple parts of the business to ultimately ensure that the product is successful but trust, collaboration, and delegation is in many ways more important than ownership of the product.
Questions:
- What are some of the best projects to ensure that the project is moving forward without feeling like you are stepping on the toes of other people at the company? Have you run into many scenarios like this and how did you solve that?
- What are some crucial skills that you believe PM should have? Do you believe that will evolve in the next few years?
