Product Management Job Description
An exercise to find out what people at your organization think a product manager should do.
One of the interesting (challenging?) aspects of product management is how every organization seems to have its own interpretation of what a product manager actually should do.
It gets even more jumbled in those organizations that are trying to adopt product management for internal products and in their IT organizations.
I don’t think you’re ever going to find one definitive answer, but I’ve come across an exercise that will at least help you find out what people at your organization think a product manager should do.
Force Ranking Your Job Description
A couple of years ago, John Cutler published an article So You’re Hiring a Product Manager that described what he does when asked for help in hiring a product manager.
He provides the requestor with a list of 20 potential job responsibilities of product managers and asks them to force rank them. (Emphasis added is my own).
It’s worth repeating why he asks people to force rank the list:
Force ranking is important, because you can never “have it all”. I suggest they reflect on their actual work-environment… not an imaginary, rosy, future environment. I also suggest they don’t overthink the exercise: certain options are ambiguous by design (and might also rub them the wrong way). The results tell me a good deal about the environment, and who might thrive there.
It’s also important to note that you shouldn’t interpret the order in which John listed the responsibilities reflect his perspective on product management.
Try this exercise out with your product leader, even if they aren’t trying to hire someone. It’ll certainly give you a sense of what they think product managers do in your organization (which may or may not reflect what they actually do - a topic for a different newsletter).
Where to get great product management info
Aside from InsideProduct, there are several great resources for practical product management information. One of my go to sources is the Product Briefing from Department of Product.
The Product Briefing is a curated selection of product news, launches and analysis from around the web designed to help you stay in the loop with the latest product developments and build winning products. Join 18,000+ product people from Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and get your free weekly product briefing. (Affiliate link)
An IT Product Manager’s Job Description
I find this exercise helpful for sparking a discussion about the responsibilities of a product manager working on internal tools. Especially if they’re working at an organization that’s in the process of a product transformation.
The exercise is helpful because it gives you a chance to dig into whether the leaders in your organization are serious about truly applying product thinking (i.e. an end to end product manager) or if they’re just slapping a new label on the old way of working (product person as a servant of the development team).
You could also take a stab at what you think your responsibilities should be when you’re working on an internal product so that you can spark some discussion.
To show you what I mean, I took the criteria from John’s article and grouped them into one of four categories:
Essential
Desired
Meh
Someone Else
And then stack ranked the items within each group.
I did this to make a point about trying to move internal Product Managers further up in the product development lifecycle. This means they’re working with an empowered product team charged with a problem to solve, rather than a feature factory assigned a solution to implement.
Essential
To build a deep understanding of customer needs and pain-points
To develop a deep understanding of business goals
To formulate, test, revise, and communicate a product strategy
To provide the necessary context to the team so that they can make reasonably good decisions, reasonably quickly
Desired
[Work with product team to] figure out how to leverage design and technology to meet those goals
To delight our customers and make sure we are always improving the product experience
To hit measurable and specific goals tied to short, medium, and long-term business outcomes
To act as the “glue” for a team of talented designers, developers, and [other roles like data science, marketing, etc. ]
Define the “right things” so that the team can “build them right”
To maximize the ROI of the team’s efforts (This is joint with the product team)
To own the prioritization of the roadmap and backlog
Meh
To shield their team from requests and interruptions, while managing external stakeholders and keeping everyone in the loop
To collect requests from inside the company, put together a roadmap, and make it visible to the rest of the company
To field external customer requests, prioritize them according to value and level of effort, and then make sure they are delivered quickly without sacrificing quality
Someone else
To troubleshoot and figure out why their team is not delivering more quickly
To make the final call on design and technical decisions. To make sure the team makes the right technical and design tradeoffs
To ensure predictable and timely delivery of features and capabilities
To manage their product and team as a CEO might manage a startup and team
To call “bullshit” on team estimates, and basically hold them accountable
To manage projects from definition all the way through to release
The “Someone else” may be a Tech Lead or Delivery Lead depending on the responsibility. Getting these responsibilities in the right place is critical to free an internal product manager up to do, you know, product management.
So what do you think?
I shared these groupings because I figured they’d elicit some sort of response.
So let me have it. Does this grouping make sense? What would you change? Better yet, how would you rank the responsibilities? Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.
If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email.
Talk to you next week,
Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media