I see a product manager’s job as one who generally leads and drives a project/product from start to finish. However, I wholeheartedly agree with Matt LeMay that product management in theory is very different from product management in practice. Product managers can look different and act different depending on the company, period of the product’s lifecycle, and product manager’s philosophy. As such, I find that the analogy that product managers must be able to don different hats is very true. Some days they may be an engineer, marketer, designer, project manager, etc. Furthermore, product managers’ roles come in many different packages. A product manager can be in charge of a whole product such as a car or mobile application, or as small of a segment of a product such as a car mirror or UI feature. Thus, depending on the scope, product managers’ jobs change drastically as a product manager working on the whole car will plan more and have a larger scope in comparison to a product manager working on just the car mirrors.
One question I have for LeMay is how he sees the Product Manager role evolving in the future?
