Chapter 8. The Product Manager Career Path
When organizations are small, their product teams are also small, which means that those people do literally everything. They span across many functions—and have to—in order to ensure the success of their company. As companies begin to scale, their product teams must scale, as well, and responsibilities become more defined. There are not enough hours in the day for one person to do all the work that is required to support a portfolio of products. This introduces more levels in the product management organization, and the responsibilities of these people change depending on the amount of tactical, strategic, and operational work they do.
Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future state and that aligns the teams around the work.
The foundations of working with a development team, diving into individual user needs and ...
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