After reading Chapter 1 of Product Management in Practice by Matt Lemay, I think there are two tiers of responsibilities of a product manager.
Their first-order responsibility is not their job description, but instead, communication. Because their job description, though varying by company, necessitates they exist in the ether between all organizational departments and functions, they essentially act as the neural system of the company, they must be able to listen, understand, consume, synthesize, and communicate quickly, concisely and understandably.
I believe a product manager’s first-order responsibility is communication because companies are fundamentally human. This means as idealistically as we want to believe the ‘professional’ and ‘corporate’ world is devoid of emotion and prevailing with reason, that is not the case. At its core, a company is a group of highly emotional, vibrant, yet predictably unpredictable people who (ideally) vary greatly in their ideals, thoughts, expertise, and communication patterns. A product manager’s responsibility is to unite and connect these individuals in a way to allows them to work as effectively as possible to produce the greatest value for the company.
Their second-order responsibility then is their physical job description, which, as noted in the reading, varies greatly, even within organizations. However, I think the crux of all product management roles, is the common denominator, wherein product management exists as a function within the company, responsible for receiving large, nebulous, nearly impossible problems, and identifying a solution based on the input, feedback of stakeholders and the time and resource constraints imposed by the organization.
In practice, there is a myriad of techniques and approaches for tackling large and nebulous ideas as an organization’s neural system, guiding product and organizational development by leveraging trust earned via demonstrated competency. However, based on the reading, the somewhat amorphous job description seemed to distill as the common second-order responsibility of the product manager, existing in tandem with the human concerns of the organization.
One question that did arise after I completed the reading, was: it seemed as though the author’s main gripe with the specialization of the role of product management is that it will lead to confusion about the role itself. However, are there any technical objections to the specialization (ie. will product managers be less effective) if the role continues to specialize?
