What exactly does a product manager do?

I recently came across a job advert for a product manager at a European startup. A few weeks later, I noticed that the job title had changed to ‘Technical Product Manager‘ while the job description remained very much the same. Thanks to LinkedIn’s recommendation engine, about a month later, I realised the same company was now looking for a Product Owner (yes, you guessed it right: the job description hadn’t budged an inch). Something seemed off: either this particular company was using the job title as a keyword to generate as many applications as possible, or they were genuinely confused about the role of product within their organisation.

It was against this backdrop that I listened to a podcast where Marty Cagan ¹ talks about the role of product teams and where most companies get it wrong. Cagan says that there is a distinct difference between a product team and a features team: the former are given problems to solve (be it company or customer-related) as well as the functional skills required to tackle them, whereas the latter are simply given a roadmap and a list of features to build. The number of features churned out is immaterial if they do not solve the underlying problems that the company faces.

I’ve summarised below some of my other takeaways from the podcast:

• According to Cagan, only 10-15% of companies are good product companies. The issue—Cagan quotes an old interview of Steve Jobs here—is that even organisations that start in the right direction lose their mojo as they grow and their products start generating revenue. Once they reach this comfort zone, most companies tend to prioritise functions such as marketing and finance, and product discovery takes a back seat. Apparently, this ‘disease’ is a stumbling block to innovation.

• Cagan also suggests a model for product teams to work effectively. Once a problem has been validated and a solution is being discovered, it is the product manager’s responsibility to ensure that whatever the team decides upon is valuable and viable. The engineering and design teams would, for their part, assess the feasibility (can we build this solution?) and usability (can the user easily accomplish the task?) of the solution respectively. This means that a product manager should have direct access to customers, the engineering team and the various stakeholders. Cagan says that this direct and unencumbered access is non-negotiable and a prerequisite for a product manager to succeed in their role.

• Useful tip: When you do user research, you do it to find out all the reasons why users won’t use your product.

• Product managers should be well-versed in four areas: the users and the customers; how the product is being used; how the product fits into the bigger picture of the organisation; and, the overall industry and competition.

• For the startup that has now settled on the Product Owner title, Cagan has some choice words. He says the product owner role (when separate) is an ‘administrative role’ parading as a product role. According to him, teaching a process like scrum by an Agile coach doesn’t make someone product-oriented and it is Europe that seems obsessed with such roles/titles. 🤷🏽‍♂️