What is a product manager?
Can you explain product management to your parents? When you say that you are a product manager did you encounter questions like “How many products are you selling in your company?” and did you see a big disappointment when you say “just 1!”.
Are you trying to improve your speech by explaining your job by the feedback you get every time, did you already find a perfect sentence that always works? The most common one is:
“A product manager is the CEO of the product.”
This is probably the cheapest bullshit I’ve ever heard. Still, I am happy because it could be worse like: “A product manager is the manager of the product.” I repeat, a product manager is not the CEO of the product.
What is a product?
A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. In startups, it is 99,999% to generate revenue. If the CEO doesn’t say so, he doesn’t know about his job or he’s lying.
OK! Let’s go back to the product manager topic
A product manager is not a person who’s just interacting with the product. He is also setting the balance of the team and driving the team towards the business goals. They need access to business data and a lot of communication with the team and stakeholders. They seek opportunities to optimize the process (decrease the cost) or generate retention or adoption (revenue). To do this, of course, they have to analyze, prototype, split projects, define the timeline, manage resources and time.
As you can see all the roadmapping, prototyping, survey things are just methods to reach the objectives. They are not the objectives of a product manager. Yes, in this case almost all of the product manager job ads are wrong. It is based on an outdated, memorized definition and nobody is questioning that at all.
Objectives… got it. But what about goals then?
There is only one goal: Increasing profits. All other goals are sub-goals. And every single subgoal has to be correlated with that goal. If you don’t think so and think that you have to give more to your users, keep in mind that the company or your job might be in danger.
So? What is a product manager?
A product manager is a person who analyses the market and company resources; drives the team to what to build now and next with the supreme goal of increasing profits. If that doesn’t work with your parents, just say that you work in an office on some computer related stuff and you eat regularly on lunchtimes.
