As a past product intern at a rapidly scaling startup this summer, I completely agree with the need to be decisive and self-pioneering as a product manager. Frankly, everyone who has a defined role in a technical or operational space is knee-deep in their own context and work mission-critical for company survival that nobody has time to scope out a job for a product manager. Just to draw more from personal experience, my manager was the product manager (AND the product designer and operations lead), and she did everything from coordinating tag-ups between different teams, manage office space problems and general company-level improvements from food to relationships, work on internal and external facing to0ls, converse with manufacturing, operations, product, and business, and interface with clients. They see what needs exist in the company and fill in as the glue, especially the non-glamourous and tedious activities such as keeping people across all functional teams in communication with each other and synthesizing all forms of problems.
This experience informs my perspective of a product manager as not only someone who manages a product but takes control of the well-being of their team (which could span the entire company in the early stages, as in the case of my manager) in addition to doing all forms of problem-solving that would impact their team’s ability to resolve the problem / complete the task.
Questions I have are, what traits of a good product manager can be developed, whereas which ones are likely innate?
