As someone who comes from a primarily engineering background, it always bothered me that I’ve never actually gotten a true, concrete answer for what exactly a product manager’s job is. For SWEs it’s pretty straightforward to explain what you do, but for product managers I’ve always received hand-wavey answers, and after this reading I think it makes sense – the role changes so drastically between companies and positions and the responsibilities and work of that role are constantly changing day-to-day. For me though the primary takeaways from this reading on the job of the product manager is to be whatever the product / the company needs them to be at any given moment, and to maintain responsibility for whichever product they are in charge of. Navigating the space of what exactly needs to be done is a large part of this, which is why the reading talks fairly often about dealing with ambiguity, along with the quote “The skill of actually figuring out what you need is probably as important as what you do after you figure it out”. One thing that was personally surprising for me was the different profiles of bad PMs, especially that of the ‘overachiever’, since the description of someone as a “go-getter who can deliver lots of stuff” seems to be aligned with the role of a product manager. From this example I think there’s also a personal-element to the job of the product manager – they also have a responsibility to their own team and the team’s wellbeing. It does raise a few important questions though: in cases where a team’s wellbeing would be significantly negatively impacted in order to meet a particular deadline or goal, does the PM have a greater responsibility to protect their team, or to meet the goals of the product? Is it the PM’s responsibility to ensure that these situations don’t occur in the first place? Also, in what ways can PMs minimize their potential harms to their team?
