What It’s Like to Work as a Product Manager

Working as a product manager can be a fun and fulfilling career if you have the mindset for it. A combination of creative problem solving, balancing resources, and communication skills, some people absolutely thrive in product management, helping to bring teams together and deliver better results.

But what exactly does a product manager do? What is their role in a company? And how can you become one?

What Does a Product Manager Do?

If you’ve never heard of product management before then it probably sounds like two corporate buzzwords thrown together. You might be picturing one of those roles that involves a lot of talking but little practical value. Put simply, a professional meeting-taker.

In a sense this is true. A product manager does do a lot of coordination and there are a lot of meetings involved. They have to talk to various teams, share ideas, and send a lot of emails.

With all that said, a good product manager can make or break a company – particularly startups – and it’s one of the roles recruiters are most concerned about filling. At its core, the job is about deciding what the product should be. What kind of features or services should it include? What exactly is the company offering?

Product Management Responsibilities

At the same time it’s also about setting limits. Any project can easily balloon in scope if you don’t have a really clear notion of what the end project can be.

For example, let’s say your product is a transcription service. Its job is to provide a writeout of company meetings. That’s a useful and specific niche to fill. As the tool gets developed more ideas get thrown into the mix. What if the meeting notes were automatically sent to everyone by email? What if that system could also send updates about future meanings? What if we built a whole email client into our transcription app?

All of a sudden you’re stretching yourself too thin. Your app is falling apart at the seams because it’s trying to solve every problem at once. In short, you’ve lost track of what the product should be.

A product manager’s core responsibility is to keep the product vision aligned. They have to control scope. They have to ensure that the right features are being developed and wrong features are cut. At times they might even push for a pivot if it becomes apparent that the current vision isn’t working but they do so with clear and specific intentions.

How To Become a Product Manager

Product management is a great career goal but it’s very rarely an entry level job. While there are courses you can take to learn the basics, nothing beats practical, on the job experience of product development.

Of course the upside of this is that there are many ways to get into product management, especially if you’re working within a niche. You can use experience in just about any area of product development to become a project manager. The key is that you’ve spent some time with your boots on the ground, seeing what it’s like for the people who make and sell a product.

It’s also important to have experience with consumers. When starting out, it’s easy to become attached to a creative vision but good product management really isn’t about that. It’s about setting your ego aside and producing the solution that will work.

This is easy in theory but hard in practice. It’s not about being clever or even insightful but about having the kind of genuine perspective that comes with experience. You just can’t know what’s practical until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

They say no plan survives first contact with the enemy. On a similar note, no product survives first contact with the consumer. Good managers know how to adapt their product based on feedback and testing without losing the core of what it is. That’s an instinct you have to build up over time.