You Might Not Be A Product Manager

What does every Product Op Model say you need for a good product development team? Well, you need some delivery team members. Hopefully they’re cross-functional and have all the skills needed to go from idea to cash. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some kind of facilitator – a scrum master or coach or someone willing to run all the meetings, handle logistics, and clear roadblocks for the team. Then we come to the (arguably) most important individual role on the team: the product manager.

What is a Product Manager?

This is the person responsible for the “Vision”, the “What”, and the “Product Success” of the team. Almost every organization we walk into has plenty of people with this title. Typically they’re very smart, highly organized, and incredibly busy people with full calendars and the drive to change the world. They’re closely aligned to one or two development teams and do everything they can to bring work in a clearly refined, articulate backlog of features and stories to the team to complete. They’re excellent facilitators and relationship managers navigating politically complex and demanding stakeholders. They’re doing the absolute best they can.

They are not, however, true Product Managers.

At this point you may be reaching for your pitchfork. I’m not saying you shouldn't, I’m just asking you to pause and read the rest before you come for me.

Things a good Product Manager does

Let’s take a look at some of the attributes of a Product Manager.

According to Grok 3, a Product Manager is responsible for and accountable to…

• Define the product vision and roadmap.
• Understand and represent customer needs.
• Collaborate with engineering, design, and other teams.
• Write clear product requirements and user stories.
• Prioritize features and manage timelines.
• Analyze data to track performance and guide decisions.
• Plan and support product launches with marketing.
• Solve problems and adapt to changes.
• Communicate plans and updates to stakeholders.

We could argue the finer points of this list. Maybe you think it's missing something, or maybe a line or two needs to be reworded. But it'll work for the purposes of this article (and I'm a big fan of the 80/20 rule). 

I imagine here, most people with Product Manager on their LinkedIn are self-assessing and trying to reword some of these to make them true about yourselves. But, safe space here, do you really get to define the vision and roadmap for your product?

Example Challenges for a Product Manager

Or, on a regular basis, does your leader hand you something somewhere between high-level strategic goals for the year and specific projects that your team is going to do, no matter what?

Imagine a stakeholder goes crying to said boss because you said, “No, not right now because it doesn’t fit into our roadmap” to their boondoggle request. Do you then find yourself forcing said boondoggle onto your already over-capacity team?

How often do you actually talk to the customers buying your product on their credit card? Or are your days filled with meetings with “stakeholders” who swear they’re speaking on the customers’ behalf?

You get the idea. In our world, it’s very common to adopt a role’s title in your HRM and write up a flowery job description that in no way reflects the actual day-to-day responsibilities. It’s okay if you’re starting from there. The first step is admitting there’s a problem. Below, you’ll see a self-assessment to benchmark where you’re at with these attributes. You’ll probably find areas where you’re already knocking it out of the park and some parts where you’re nowhere near the common definition.

Product Manager Self-Assessment

Rate yourself from 1-5 in each of the categories below, and you can receive personalized feedback about the fastest way to level up your product management skills.

Once you take it, you’ll get notified when the next in this series comes out. Part 2 is going to dive into self-empowerment vs. actual empowerment and give you some strategies on how to start moving these needles. Stay tuned!