How you see a product manager’s job?
My Experience
Working at Stripe over the summer on engineering, my understanding of a product manager’s job centered around: connecting people internally and creating business justifications to unlock new features that the engineering staff could act on. In the context of Stripe, I think that perspective made sense because there are so many engineering teams at such a large company that need to communicate and work together for bigger/newer projects, but, with this reading in hand, I also feel like my view must have been influenced heavily by only seeing what parts of their work were relevant to mine.
My New Understanding
The author’s borrowed recontextualization of product managers/ADPRs as the “stewards of a value exchange between business and its customers” helped me reinterpret the role. Product definitely exists in the “middle” area between deep, technical work that enables a product to exist and the much more human, emotionally-based environment that products exist in throughout the real world. Thus, I largely agree with the author’s assessment that a product manager’s job is doing the work that needs to be done for a product’s success. I can see his examples of how office management or community leadership or any seemingly tangential role could be critical depending on the product stage, industry, company size, etc. since a given product’s requirements only exist meaningfully in context. From that perspective, I can say, with certainty, that the Stripe product managers I interacted with, in addition to talking to engineering and sales teams, probably also did a million things behind the scenes since the products we engineers shipped were their responsibility and they definitely didn’t have authority over anyone on either the engineering or sales sides of things.
What questions you would have for the author of the book?
Right away, I’d ask how a new product manager ought to iterate through different types of work to find the high ROI items that bring value back to the team and product.
The author says “you can’t wait around until somebody tells you what to do” and “if it needs to get done, it’s part of your job” but these two points seems like they could be contradictory. What if there’s important work that’s not even on anyone’s radar that you’ll need to pick up? How do you find this type of work? How much of the work you “need to get done” is visible/available? This feels core to delivering value early on.
On another note: How you do you know when something becomes too low ROI to continue?
Is this a thing that happens? When you don’t have authority but have to do, say, sales work early on, how does one navigate pushing for organizational changes to keep things moving efficiently by, saying, making a sales team? It seems as though having broad responsibilities makes PMs important to driving change but, with a reliance on driving change through individual relationships, what does driving broader change look like?
