Q: What exactly is the job of a product manager?
I generally avoid meta questions like this, since they’re rarely actionable or useful. But because this is such a common PM interview question and because I’ve gotten this question from readers enough times and never found a definition that I like elsewhere, I’m going to tackle it this week.
The job of a product manager
I like this baseline definition:
Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
There are three parts to this, each essential:
1. Deliver business impact
Fundamentally, you are responsible for delivering business impact. If your team drives positive impact—hitting important goals, reducing costs, shipping an important project, etc.—you’re doing your job.
2. Marshaling the resources of your team
Your job isn’t to do the building yourself but instead to increase the leverage of your cross-functional teammates—designers, engineers, data scientists, researchers—to deliver impact. To paraphrase Andy Grove, a product manager’s output = the output of their team.
3. Identify and solve the most impactful customer problems
Business impact comes from solving customer problems. Thus, it’s your job to lead your team to correctly identify, prioritize, and solve the most impactful customer problems.
PMs are the ultimate business lever.
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
—Archimedes
The three core jobs of a product manager
Another way to define the role of a PM is to break out the day-to-day jobs of a product manager:
- Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have the most impact on the business.
- Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises.
- Synchronize the people: Align all stakeholders around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort.
All of that is a means to delivering impact.
The attributes of successful product managers
A different approach to understanding the PM job is to look at how PMs are evaluated. Earlier this year, I collected and analyzed dozens of career ladders from companies big and small, and out of this emerged 10 common attributes of successful product managers:
You can learn more about each of these attributes here, including which attributes most separate junior and senior PMs. You’ll need to develop each of these to thrive as a PM long-term, but if you’re just starting out, I’d suggest focusing on these five:
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Execution
- Customer insights
- Strategy
At the end of the post, I link to further reading on each of these areas.
The most important PM skills when interviewing
In a different research project, I surveyed about 1,000 PMs across hundreds of companies and asked them what skills matter most when hiring PMs. The results provide insight into not only what PMs need to demonstrate when they do the job (i.e. the list above) but also what skills companies look for when hiring. In addition to communication, execution, strategic thinking, and collaboration—which we covered above—companies also look for “product sense.” To learn more about this skill, I suggest this post by Julie Zhuo.
How the PM role varies by company
Everything we’ve talked about above is based on the typical PM role. But the PM role is rarely typical. If you’re looking to get into PM, it’s important that you look into how the company you work at (or plan to work at) specifically looks at the PM role. There are two axes across which the PM role most varies:
- Skills: Which skills matter most
- Influence: How much influence a PM has within the org
How skills vary
Though companies look for the same broad set of skills in their PMs, the skills they care about the most vary widely. Here’s a look at which skills a bunch of well-known companies emphasize (the darker the color, the more important it is to them):
How influence varies
The amount of influence a PM has within an organization also varies widely. On one end of the spectrum, we have the mini-CEO, who is very much in charge. On the other end, we essentially have a project manager—responsible for execution but with no real say over what gets built. Here’s what this spectrum looks like at these same companies—Zynga on one side and Apple on the other:
Startup PM vs. big-company PM
Finally, when looking at the PM role, it’s important to differentiate between a startup and a big-company PM. The difference is even more significant than the two spectrums we looked at above. Every single part of the job is different:
In the end, no matter how many definitions and details you read about the PM role, it’ll never be exactly the same at any company. Every founder and product leader will have their own unique take on what they expect from their PMs. So what to do?
- If you’re already at a company and looking to understand the role better, ask your manager what “amazing” in the role would look like.
- If you’re exploring getting into PM, ask the companies you talk to (1) what skills they care about most and (2) how much say a PM has compared to other functions.
- If you’re just curious about the PM role, find a few PMs and ask them about their job.
📚 Further study
- Product management career ladders
- A comprehensive survey of Product Management
- Should I become a product manager
- How to get into product management
- Startup PM vs. big-company PM
- Getting better at product strategy
- The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR Framework
Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏
🔥 Featured job openings
- GetSetUp: Product Lead, Discovery (Remote-Global)
- Morty: Founding Product Manager (Consumer)
- Otto: Senior Product Manager (Remote-US)
- Mynd: Product Lead, Leasing & Residents (Remote-US)
- TaskRabbit: Chief Product Officer (Remote-US)
- Fiveable: Head of Product (Remote-US)
- Catalog: Senior Project Manager (Remote-Global)
- Enterpret: Principal Product Manager (NYC)
- Launch House: Growth Associate (Remote-US)
- Hyphen: Senior Software Engineer (LA, San Jose, ATL, Remote-US)
- Rapchat: Data Analyst (Remote-US/EU)
Browse more open roles, or add your own, at Lenny’s Job Board.
🧠 Inspiration for the week ahead
- Watch: Birds with people arms
- Read: Wait, but Have You Tried by Michelle Rial (my wife!), The New Yorker
- Listen: Red (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋