I tend to get asked how to define the role of product management either when someone is considering it as a role in their career or when someone is dissatisfied with the PM on their team. The challenge in both of these cases is that they’re so contextually tied to the specific role, team, and company they’re operating within that it’s difficult to make sweeping generalizations about the role that are evergreen.
But I’ll give a try anyway. This is my mental model for how I think about the role of product management, shaped heavily by the PM roles I’ve held across companies, teams, and products.
I think of product management as addressing “3 P’s”: product, process, and people. ___ book actually defined these three P’s from a people management perspective, and I could imagine three P’s being applied to other roles like product design, engineering, and technical program management. That’s what’s great about them. Everyone’s focusing on the 3 P’s from a different perspective, which makes cross-functional teams work well together. But here are my 3 P’s for product.
Product: Define the problems to be solved
At the end of the day, products are things people use to solve problems in their lives. The screen you’re reading this post on is a part of a product used to accomplish tasks. The apps you use on your phone are products used to meet a range of human needs, from connecting with people you care about to learning new languages to managing personal finances. Even creative entertainment works like movies and games are products used to relieve boredom and influence your worldviews.
Product managers are primarily responsible for defining the problems that products should solve to maximize their business impact. They do this by applying strategic frameworks for discovering and aligning people on who the product should target, what problems it should solve, and how solving the problem should be approached.
I find the operative words that PMs should focus on are “why” (as in, why are we building this product?), “who” (as in, who is this product for?), and a certain kind of “what” (as in, what problem should this product solve?) and “how” (as in, how should we approach solving the problem?).