What are the skills and experience needed to be a product manager? Can someone explain what a pm does? They appear to be in charge of many things it's never been clear to me what the actual role means.

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This is still a pretty big generalization, but it’s mostly:

1. Being a cross-functional translator
2. Being able to rally people behind you to accomplish projects without having direct authority over anyone
3. Ensuring solutions accomplish the core goal of all the stakeholder teams involved and of the exec team

I personally think it’s a role well suited for people who are pretty good to great at a lot of things, but may not be excellent at any one particular thing. I am not the best designer, engineer, data scientist, or sales person. However, I can definitely bridge the gaps between all the teams and help them understand what they need to do in order to deliver on a roadmap. I am able to flex and work on any one of those teams for a period if necessary. In an average day, I will probably do some combination of:

- Review mockups from design and give feedback
- Pull some data to analyze why something is happening
- Review some PRs
- Review talking points for CSM (I work in SaaS) on what to notify our customers about in terms of product changes
- Review new BD & sales materials and help create deliverables
- Write proposals for new features and find time to architect with engineering to understand feasibility

The work is still very much tactical a lot of the time (at least in my experience), but ideas are cheap and new products aren’t delivered with just talk.

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The role can largely depend on the organization of the company and the industry you are in, but I have always equated it to “Brand Manager role for Tech companies”

By the book, a product manager will be part of a product management organization within a company and will own the feature roadmap for a particular product (its always easy for me to think of a mobile application as an example product). The goal of a product owner is to prioritize high value features in this roadmap based on business case, technical feasibility, and customer need/desire. The definition of “value” will differ across companies, but the role often sits at the intersection of engineering, business/strategy operations, and marketing.

Skills needed would be basic project management skills, stakeholder management skills, communication (explains different complex topics at various levels of detail to multiple types of stakeholders), technical knowledge (the depth of this requirement depends on the company - some companies require PMs to have a Software Dev background), and user research skills like interviewing, survey analysis, etc. Personally, I think one of the most important skills to being a great product manager is experience using the product as a customer or support agent. You want to know all the use cases and edge cases and areas where your product can really improve. Having a passion for the product you manage really goes a long way too!

Hope this helps!

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Slipped up and threw a “product owner” role in there accidentally. They are different roles so please don’t be confused by that!

PMs are in charge of many things and it’s never clear what the actual role means. So you nailed it bang on.

There is no way of telling you specifically what a PM does, that will vary for every job posting. But you will be doing a lot of things, mainly managing a team to move to product forward, but that alone has multiple different day to day tasks involved

Got turned down for product management role once because “we’re looking for someone with more product experience”.

Same!!

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