I see a product managers job as the person who keeps the beat for product teams. You may not necessarily have strictly defined duties that you perform every day, but you removes roadblocks, organize efforts, and encourage your team to continue to strive for benchmarks that you set for them. Your job is to define the product your customers want and a path to get to it, and then encourage those around you to follow that path.
The biggest question I have for the author of the book is for more clarity around how to act in situations of high responsibility and low authority. I have heard this as a description of product management roles before and obviously it depends on the org structure of the company, but this seems to me like it would be an inefficient way to get things done. Why do companies not give authority to the people responsibility for the success of their product. Some of this has to do with highly matrixed organizations, but it is difficult to convince me that people should be responsible for things and people they have no authority over. I understand this is the reality of working as a PM and cross functional collaboration is effectively your job description, but I don’t understand why it is the case.
