03. What a PM Does

What a PM Does

Product Managers do a lot of things!

• Finding the problem (Understand, Identify, Define)
  This is part of the core PM and is one of the most important things that a PM does. PMs spend a lot of time defining the problem for the team to solve.

• Creating strategy
  Once armed with an understanding of the problem space and opportunity, PMs can build strategies for how to solve the problem through the creation of their product.

More things that Product Managers do:

• Communicating
  The best PMs ensure that the entire team is on the same page. This can be accomplished through a variety of different mediums like presentations and conversations.

All PMs write PRDs to frame the problem and document requirements for the solution.

You can test the effectiveness of your communication by asking people on the team "What are we building and why?" If you ask 5 people that question and get the same answer back from everyone the PM is doing a good job. If you ask 5 people and get 6 different answers back, the PM has more work to do

• Coordinating development and launch
  PMs are also responsible for coordinating the development and launch of their product across all the various cross functional partners involved (design, engineering, marketing, legal, support, etc). This doesn’t mean PMs do all the work; they facilitate conversations and help to remove blockers or things that might be slowing the team down. They also make sure that everything that needs to happen does actually happen.

• Responding to new information
  Things change all the time. PMs need to stay up to date with the latest information. Whether that’s from new insights from user research, results from an experiment, feedback from the support team, new product launch from a competitor.

• Responding to fires
  PMs need to be able to juggle multiple tasks and quickly switch focus when priorities change, (i.e. there is an outage).