Understand what product managers do

9 min readFeb 28, 2023

Note: Throughout the essay, I am going to use the term Product manager (PM) to refer to early-stage or aspiring PMs

I am currently teaching a course on Product Management at York University, Toronto, and students frequently ask me questions like “what is the role of a Product Manager (PM)?” and “What are PMs responsibilities?” Though the Product Manager (PM) title sounds exciting and carries a significant responsibility, PMs don’t have the authority to make decisions or direct any team members, such as engineers, designers, or analysts. According to Dan Olsen, author of The Lean Product Playbook, the Product Manager’s motto is “With great responsibility comes no power.” PM is a challenging role mainly because this role simply doesn’t have any direct authority over most of the decisions, and it varies widely in each organization. Thus, how do you learn what PMs do?
This post aims to share what product managers do; you will have a 360-degree understanding of a PM role when you enter your first role or during your early PM tenure.

What is the PM's role?

PMs are essential to organizations that produce or deliver products or services. They manage the entire product lifecycle, from the ideation stage to the product’s launch. PMs act as the bridge between the business, design, and development teams. On a high level, the main focus of this role is to identify problems or opportunities to improve products and then decide which one to work on.

Why should you learn overall PMs’ responsibilities?

As most industries head towards the software-as-a-service (SaaS) products route, the PM role becomes more critical. Though products are easier for customers to use now, they are harder for companies to build with complex technology and the best user experience. Sometimes Aspiring or early-stage PMs struggle to understand the PM role and its responsibilities. Sometimes people have the misconception that they only have to manage projects. Though it is part of product management, it is not the primary responsibility of a PM. Often I heard comments from engineers that PMs are cheerleaders (In short, their job is to motivate engineers and nothing beyond that).
As of Feb 2023, LinkedIn shows ~175K open roles (from associate PM to product leaders) for PMs. There are plenty of PM opportunities; however, aspiring PMs find it challenging to understand the 360-degree view of this role and transition to their first PM role. Thus, to help PMs understand the day-to-day responsibilities of a PM role, I built the SPECOL framework.

SPECOL Framework

I divided PM responsibilities into a five-step framework called SPECOL. This framework will help you understand the PM’s responsibilities and decide which responsibility you want to cultivate, depending on your experience.

SPECOL stands for

(S) — Strategy
(P) — Prioritization
(E) — Execution
(CO) — Communication
(L) — Leadership

Note: The percentage added before each step indicates the amount of time a PM will spend doing that particular task in a week compared to the total weekly bandwidth.

Strategy — 16%

Defining Product Strategy and Vision — 10%

Generally, product leaders (VP or Director or Head of Product) decide the overall direction of a product; it means they identify vision, objectives or priorities depending on a company’s size. They identify what area product team should work on that will help the company to grow.

Product vision refers to the long-term aspirations for the product. It involves articulating how user behavior will change because of the product.

Product strategy, on the other hand, is the high-level plan for how a product will be developed and launched. It involves defining the target customer, understanding the competition, and identifying the key features and benefits that will differentiate the product from other products in the market.

Product strategy and vision are buzzwords, and early-stage or aspiring PMs struggle to connect with them. They failed to understand what product strategy means (not true for 100% of the folks, and it depends on your prior experience). My recommendation to those who are not able to connect with these two words, have conversations with your manager and try to connect with the company objective or goal. You, as a PM, will execute projects based on objectives or goals, and you need to have a holistic understanding of what you need to accomplish.

For example, if a company decides to improve its upgrade funnel, ask your manager the following questions:

Why do we come up with only this objective as compared to others? And what tradeoffs did we make?
How are we planning to measure if we complete this objective or not?

By asking these questions, one will start connecting with the rationale behind decision-making. As you grow professionally, your understanding of concepts like product strategy and vision will grow as well.

Researching market and competition — 4%

A PM's job is to learn about the market or industry trends and monitor competitor products. PMs' critical responsibilities are researching user behavior, market trends, and competition. If you are an aspiring PM, focus on understanding your customers’ behavior, who they are and where they generally hang out in a physical and digital space. Learn who your competitors are and what product features or functionalities they provide. Check your competitors’ websites and understand the benefits they highlighted (Generally, you will find benefits on the homepage or on a specific product page of their website). Learn about market trends and the latest technology. For example, you can learn market trends using ChatGPT by asking the right prompt. I wanted to learn more about marketplace trends, so I asked ChatGPT the below prompt:

Pricing and Packing — 2%

You can learn product pricing using the product pricing pages from company websites. For example, every product has a pricing tab on its website similar to this pricing tab. You can check your competitor’s pricing page. Companies decide product pricing based on business models; learn more about business models using my post here. Group PMs or Product leaders mostly make pricing decisions, and as an aspiring PM, you are not responsible for making any pricing decisions; however, your focus should be on learning how PM leaders make these decisions.

Prioritization — 18%

Planning and maintaining the roadmap — 5%

The product roadmap is a long-term plan for the product, and it must be constantly updated as the market, competition, and customer pain points change. The product manager must ensure that the roadmap is aligned with the company’s goals and that it is communicated effectively to all stakeholders. One of the most critical challenges early-stage or aspiring PMs face is managing the product roadmap. They usually have two questions:

How to organize content or best practices for roadmap templates
How to decide the content of the roadmap?

I covered the answer to question two in the below section, ‘Problem discovery and UX research’. When it comes to organizing roadmaps, do not make things complicated. Start with something as simple as Google Sheets with three columns such as ‘Now’, ‘Next’, and ‘Later,’ or use Kanban boards in JIRA, Notion or Trello. The goal should be to keep it simple and easy so that you can update a roadmap on recurring bases without much friction.

Problem discovery and UX research — 13%

This section is the most critical section for Associate PMs, PMs, and Sr. PMs. Managing a product roadmap is recurring work for PMs, and figuring out what will go into your roadmap is the biggest task. Your discovery and UX research process output will go to your roadmap. You will identify opportunities to improve your product during product discovery and the UX research process. Most PMs do not realize these two tasks are their primary activities. You want to ensure that during the first 2–3 years of your product tenure, you focus on learning various discovery methods and understanding techniques to perform user research. You will not find user researchers in every company, especially at startups. At startups, user research is the PM’s responsibility. As a part of this process, learn how to interview a customer and ask the right questions to uncover insights. It may sound natural to some of you, but you still want to spend time consciously building a framework to perform the above two tasks. Once you identify problems based on the company goals, you will prioritize the one with the maximum impact. I added a few resources on the above two responsibilities.

Product Discovery Basics — https://www.producttalk.org/2021/08/product-discovery/
Customer Interviews — https://www.producttalk.org/2022/12/customer-interviews/
UX research methods — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

Execution — 22%

Defining product requirements — 14%

Each company has its own standard format and templates for defining product requirements. Your manager or head of product should be able to share those details with you. Companies or experienced PMs follow use cases or story-writing formats to specify product requirements. If you are unsure about how to write requirements, create a customer’s journey and then look at each stage of the customer journey to highlight customers’ actions.

If you do not have a requirement template, check out this post for various product management templates: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-templates-issue-37

Tips to perfect your product requirement document — https://www.notion.so/blog/three-tips-product-requirement-document

Reviewing metrics — 8%

Reviewing product metrics is another responsibility that will keep you busy. Before you launch a new feature or a product, you must track appropriate metrics that will help you to learn business’s health. After the product is launched, PMs must continue to monitor its performance and make adjustments as necessary using product metrics. You can learn the definition of product metrics for various business models using my three part blog series, ‘Identify the metric that matters most.’

PMs must monitor quantitative metrics such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and qualitative metrics such as customer feedback or anecdotes to identify future opportunities. This also helps PMs to build their roadmap. PMs must work closely with the support team to ensure that customer issues or bugs are addressed promptly or tracked. To learn how to identify instrumentation to monitor KPIs refer this blog from Reforge and download the event tracking dictionary tool: Event Tracking Dictionary.

Communication — 39%

Communication is the most fundamental PM responsibility. Every product management title, starting from associated PM to CPO, focuses on different aspects of communication. As you move from Individual Contributor (IC) to product leader, you need to strengthen your communication skills.

Thus, I divided overall communication into four parts with one clear common theme: Creating a clarity for your coworkers and management

Engaging with customers and partners — 12%
Collaborating with technical and design functions — 11%
Collaborating with other functions — sales, ops, marketing, growth, leadership — 8%
Sharing vision, goals, product updates, and project status; present during all-hands meetings — 8%

As IC-level PM to a product leader, you constantly communicate project status, priorities, requirements, customer needs, business goals, etc. In every organization, PMs share project status, collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders and share roadmaps with engineering counterparts. One of the biggest challenges that PMs face is balancing the needs of different stakeholders. Thus, you need to cultivate strong negotiation skills to say ‘no’ to your stakeholder. Check my blog post on how to say ‘No’ to your stakeholders.

I personally believe, though you are a very strong communicator, you want to invest constantly in this area. You might be wondering, “What do you mean by working on strong communication skills?” My response to this question is to build a framework for communicating in every situation. I added a few example situations below.

How to communicate bad news
How to negotiate for win-win and win-lose situations
How to share status updates
How to motivate and inspire a team without any authority
How to influence your managers and skip level managers

If I have to share one resource to start working on your communication skills, read the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Leadership — 5%

Coaching, team management, team building, and recruiting — 5%

Finally, PM leaders must be able to manage the team effectively. Usually, this responsibility is part of the product leader’s role and includes setting clear expectations, providing feedback, and coaching team members to ensure they perform at their best. The product manager must also be able to motivate the team to ensure they are working towards a common goal and are excited about the product development process.

Summary

In conclusion, PMs play a critical role in the success of any product or service. PMs must understand the end-to-end responsibilities of their role to become successful. As you look at each step of the SPECOL framework, you should comprehensively understand the PM’s responsibilities. As a next step, dive deep into one or two responsibilities depending on your strengths and weaknesses and become a stronger PM to perform those duties. Please comment or share which responsibility you want to cultivate.