A Product Manager.

This might sound like a magic title for a lot of people who are just making their way into tech or are transitioning within the tech industry. There is an idealistic view of a PM as some smart problem-solving wise person who everyone respects and goes to for deliberate strategy. Little short of an Ancient Greek oracle type of deal.

Sounds about right?

It sure did to me when I was just starting out a few years back (feels like forever).

If it does to you, too, please, erase that vision from your mind right this second and let’s start again.

But what about Mary?

Let’s look at an imaginary junior PM called Mary.

Mary joins a company. A small company,  a start-up. Maybe around 5–8 people.

She might have experience of managing projects, marketing, sales, engineering and design, plus some customer care. 

Now she is ready to utilize the product craft she knows in theory from numerous online courses, books and maybe even an immersive product boot camp.

She has all her smart vocabulary polished: jobs to be done, Kano, quantitative, qualitative etc.

She feels like she is doing great on all the first meetings with the team and the engineers “get her”.

All looks great until one day, a few months into, someone introduces her to a visitor as a “project manager”. 

Her heart drops for a second, her mouth opens slowly and she squeezes out:

“Well, a product, product manager”.

Awkward pause. 

A slight smile of acknowledgment from the others. 

Mary walks back to her desk shaking her head in confusion…

What’s the moral of this story?

This story is not going to be relevant if you are working in a product-focused company with a well-defined product team or function. In other cases, “product” is an uncharted territory that only recently started to shape into existence.

Let’s face it: no one in a busy fast-moving company generally takes time to sit and understand what the other person’s responsibilities are.

People collaborate, try to push forward together, work through difficulties to get the business on the next level.

Unless it’s a team solely comprised of industry geeks, to most of your colleagues the differences between customer support and customer success, engineer vs developer, product manager, and project manager (or even a scrum master) are practically non-existent.

That’s why it’s pretty important to do some metacognitive analysis, and use it to your advantage.

What do you actually do here?

Once I realized that the perception of my role was often different from different teams, I, after a brief moment of disparity, decided to get things straight by simply going around and asking colleagues: 

“What are the three things do you think I do?”

Here is what I’ve discovered.

Engineers think I mainly:

• manage roadmap

• prioritize features

• help with the development

Customer Success think I mainly:

• manage user feedback

• prioritize features

• work with the engineers on development

Marketing thinks I mainly:

• prioritize features

• manage roadmap

• work with the engineers on development

Sales think I mainly:

• manage user feedback

• manage the project and development

• help with whatever is needed

  
  

That survey truly helped me see the gaps in the collaboration with specific departments. It looked as if the engineering, marketing, and success teams were mostly on point. Where I did need to put in more collaboration effort was the Sales department. That was something I had felt even before doing this exercise, but having their answers stair me in the face, surely pushed towards some changes.

But that is a different story.

Conclusion

The role of a product manager does have some or many misconceptions, depending on the company and your level of engagement. You might even be asked during job interviews “What is Product Management?” - and the way you describe it will very well describe your own process and values as a PM. That’s why it’s important to do periodic self-checks and ask others about what is that you do and how it is being perceived.

After all, the last thing you’d want is to have misconceptions about your own self.