Product Management in Practice

I have never really understood what a product manager’s role truly entails, and frankly, I still do not understand what a product manager does on a day-to-day basis, but I particularly like and/or am curious about the following lines from the preface and first chapter of the book.

The skill of actually figuring out what you need is probably as important as what you do after you figure it out. The ability to “deal with ambiguity” often gets thrown around as a key product management skill. I think this also relates to You can’t wait around until somebody tells you what to do. Building a product is not like a homework assignment, where there is structure, there are guidelines, and there are clear actions that you know you can take to help complete your task at hand. The product manager needs to find the context that they’re lacking, ask and answer the questions that need to be asked and answered, and know what is not known. 

But the day-to-day work of delivering those products usually involves less building than it does communicating, supporting, and facilitating. I had never realized what the author points out about “building products” being one of the things that attracts many people to this role yet in reality is something that is not actually the bulk of the role’s work. In a classmate’s blog post, I saw the analogy of “glue” being used to describe a product manager, and I think that’s quite fitting here. There are many parties and stakeholders involved in the building and shipping of the product, and the product manager is there to glue these moving parts in a cohesive manner. As such, You are not actually building the product yourself.

Question for the author

You have lots of responsibility but little authority. I was a little unclear about this statement. Certainly, the product manager has a lot of responsibility, for the team and the product and their success. The excerpt about this statement mentions designers and engineers with toxic and adamant attitudes, but just because the product manager doesn’t have direct authority doesn’t mean they can’t have strong influence. Surely, the designer and engineer can’t or shouldn’t have true authority either.

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