Product Management in Practice

To me it seems that a product manager’s job greatly depends on where that product manager works. This past summer, I worked at Snowflake, a cloud database company, and talked with a number of product managers about their jobs. Snowflake is not a consumer company, so I imagine the lives of product managers at Snowflake are very different from the lives of product managers at other companies. Product managers at Snowflake tended to be highly technical. One PM described his job in a way that particularly struck me: he said, “My job is to make the lives of engineers as easy as possible. I’m here to make engineers more efficient.” To him, PMs needed to do all the tasks that made it easier for engineers build good products (talking with customers, talking with marketing and sales, etc). For a company like Snowflake, where engineers are working on incredibly difficult, abstract problems, I think that is a perfect definition for the PM role. However, I imagine at other companies that are more focused on design and UX and less focused on tough engineering problems, the PM role shifts to be more focused on user experience (although I imagine PMs at other companies are still doing their best to make engineers’ lives easier). At any company, I see the PMs’ job as working to bring people from many different teams (and maybe even different companies) together in order to build the best products (or improve existing products) that meet customers’ needs. One question I would have for the author: How have PM roles differed at different companies you’ve worked at? What dictates how the PM role changes (size of company, enterprise vs consumer, stage of company, etc)?