What is a Product Manager? A simple answer

Marcel Gordon

8 min readMay 2, 2021

For those with limited time or patience, here’s the answer:

A product manager is someone who builds and spreads the idea of a product.

And they eventually become a product leader, and they take on another important (meta) mission:

A product leader is someone who builds and spreads the idea of product management.

That’s the conclusion. The rest of this article is to explain why this is and what it means.

Brézil [Black flag bearer.] from NYPL collection (public domain) — Vinkhuijzen collection of military uniforms, NYPL

There is no such thing as a new idea

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review

When I started in product management in the 2000s, it was a profession that was still being defined. Or redefined, since it has existed for many years in other industries, but it needed an update for modern software development.

The definition of product management from consumer goods businesses didn’t work for software. Software is much less constrained and has a long, active lifecycle. And the definition from 1980s software development wasn’t working in the 2000s because the dynamics of software had changed with the advent of the internet. So people in Silicon Valley were calling themselves Product Managers and figuring out what to do.

Today, there’s a wealth of literature on modern software product management, led by high priests like Marty Cagan and Ken Norton, focusing on discovery and delivery. There’s plenty to read that will teach you how to be a good product manager (or a bad one).

However, you can’t really define a profession through a list of skills or behaviours. The description will neither be complete nor compelling. A chef isn’t someone who bakes, roasts, fries and grills. A chef is someone who creates pleasure through food. We need to know the mission, and then we can understand how the skills and responsibilities fit to the mission. We know what product managers do, but we need to know what product management is.

So what’s the mission of a product manager? What is product management? It’s always been an ill-defined job, with lots of nice analogies — captain of a pirate ship, CEO of a product — but without a clear mission statement.

In fact, product managers have a clear and critical mission: build and spread the idea of a product. To understand what that means, we need to understand the role of ideas in human society. Yuval Noah Harari explains exactly that in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Common myths

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

If you haven’t read Sapiens, you should. It’s a wonderful flight over thousands of years of human history. If you don’t want any spoilers, stop reading this article, go and read the book, and then come back.

The key idea in Sapiens is, in fact, ideas. Not just any ideas, but ideas as a way to organize ourselves. Harari observes that so much of our capacity as a species is based on our ability to organize around shared ideas — ideas which are pure invention, existing only in our minds. By agreeing on certain shared delusions, we enable ourselves to act together in far-reaching, powerful ways.

There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Product management is exactly this kind of idea. It’s an idea that helps us to organize a set of people — first a company, then a team — around a way of working. It operates at two levels:

Product management is an idea that a company can organize around (being “product-centric”)
Each product is an idea that a team can organize around.

Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Product-centric: Product management as a way to organize a company

A company is a very useful construct to get people to work together. We can all — shareholders, management, employees — agree that we’re in the same boat, working to go in the same direction, and we agree on who is in charge (and how that can change).

So now that we’re all here, what do we do? Who is going to buy the lemons and who will make the lemonade? And who will find thirsty buyers? We need to set expectations about how each person in the company should behave in order to make us successful.

There’s an old chestnut that titles aren’t important. They are important. They tell you what your job is: they tell you what is expected from you; and they tell others what to expect from you. Titles give strong signals about roles and structure within a company. Without titles, an organization is illegible, both internally and externally.

This is exactly where product management fits in. When a company decides that it will have a product management function, it is a decision about how to organize. When that company is — or aspires to be — a modern software company, then the mere existence of a product management function should impart to everyone in the organization a key set of principles about the company and how it will be successful:

Shared value: We build standardized products, not custom solutions
Continuous improvement: We carry out cycles of develop, ship, evaluate
User-centric: We listen to our customers to understand how to improve our products
And so on

The idea of product management also assigns some fundamental responsibilities:

Product Management will own the vision and roadmap
Product Management will prioritize the product development work
Product Management will not define the technical solutions
And so forth

Of course, this doesn’t answer all of the questions. Even within modern, product-centric software companies there are a range of implementations. Google is famously eng-driven, while Airbnb is possibly design-centric. However, when you zoom out you see that these variations exist within a relatively narrow band of possibilities. We can see the contrasts between these companies because so much is shared. What is shared is what it means to be product-centric.

If you’re a newly installed Head of Product, VP Product or CPO, this is your first and most important problem. Your job is to ensure that the company understands what it means to be product-centric. You need to define the role of your function, product management, within the company. It’s only once that has been done — and there’s normally a small (*cough*) amount of change management involved — that your Product Managers can use products to organize their teams.

A product as a way to organize a team

You’re a Product Manager. You are already benefiting from the fact that everyone understands your role, because your company is product-centric. That organizing idea at the company level has given you the chance to be successful, but it is not enough on its own.

Every team needs a product to organize around. Everyone knows who should do what, but each team member also needs to know what to do. What are the Account Executives selling? What are the Software Engineers building? What are Customer Success supporting? The answer: our product. Your product.

The role of product management is to build and carry the idea of the product. Think of it like a flag carried into battle, rallying the troops to hold the hill or storm the trenches. Your job — your real job — is to wave that banner, and to use it to lead the team to success.

Your job is to enable a team to pursue an idea. That idea is the product.

Let’s go through some of the canon of product wisdom with this idea in mind — underlining what this insight means for you as the product manager:

Communication is everything: This is the most important part of the product management job. It is with communication that you share the idea of the product and enable everyone to rally around it. If you can’t effectively convey to people what the product is, they can’t build it, sell it or support it.
So: Ensure that everyone knows and understands the core product idea.
Many suggestions, one solution: Your job isn’t to bring all the solutions. You want your entire team to contribute to the idea of the product, to build a powerful product and based on a shared idea. Your job is to enable that by clearly defining the problem and the objective and enabling the experts on your team to contribute their best.
So: Continuously marshall the team’s thinking into a single coherent product idea.
Enable product-led growth: People rally to an idea when it speaks to them. Not just the team: a great product is one that users will fight for. Your team builds the product, but real success is when the idea of your product empowers a client or an industry.
So: Enable your users to spread your product idea for you.
Ensure your developers understand your users: You need alignment around the idea of your product. Think of it like building a solar concentrator. If your engineers have one idea of your product, and your users another, you’ll lack the focused energy that you need.
So: Align your engineers around your users’ idea of the product.
Test early and often: Don’t wed yourself to specific details of the product idea. Focus on the problem you want to solve, not the solution you have in mind. You can continuously refine the details of what you’re building without losing the core idea of the product.
So: Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.
Bring the donuts: Actually, this isn’t about the product at all, it’s about the team. Great products are built by great teams, and great teams are built by great attitudes. When you are looking to do whatever needs to be done, you bring that attitude into the team.
So: Help build the team’s idea of itself as a great team. (See what we did there?)

The first principle of product management

Hopefully you should start to see that this thread links nearly everything that we do in modern software product management. If you are ever wondering what to do — or why you’re being advised to do something — you now have a first principle to go back to: