As an individual who has PM’d in a professional context before, I agree that defining product management can be quite challenging. I often feel like we get lost in product jargon; I believe product management is much less about the titles and definitions than it is about practice. At every company, product management is going to look slightly different.
I view the product manager as someone who not only has to manage the team but also themselves. You can’t wait around until someone tells you what to do so part of the job is prioritizing and figuring out what to work on to help contribute to the product you’re working on. Your metric of success is the success of the team, which means that you are accountable for many things and are often stuck in the middle. In practice, from my experience, this means that you’re often juggling multiple stakeholders and attending many meetings. As such, the product manager has limited “focus time”. It’s the job of the product manager to make sure that the designers and developers don’t have blockers to their work, which can make it easy to fall into the trap of the Product Martyr archetype. No one is really checking in on the product manager; the product manager is too busy checking in on everyone else.
Question: How does a PM prevent themselves from being one of the bad PM archetypes?
