What Is Product Management?

In the past few decades, product management has emerged as a critical role for any organization building products or experiences. The day-to-day work of product management varies widely from organization to organization, but the mandate for product managers is consistent: to connect and align internal stakeholders around the goals of your business, and to make sure that those goals are aligned with the needs of your customers.

As illustrated in Figure 1-1, this often means working with the designers and developers charged with actually building and maintaining a product as well as any other stakeholders (such as business analysts) working on that particular product team. Depending on the specifics of the organization and the product, a product manager might oversee the roadmap for their specific product, conduct research to understand the competitive landscape, and manage the day-to-day workings of the product team using an Agile process such as Scrum or XP.

Figure 1-1. Product management sitting between business, design, and technology

A product manager’s connective responsibilities also extend beyond their immediate product team. As illustrated in Figure 1-2, product managers must also connect and align between their team and other product teams as well as the executives who generally set the organization’s strategy and vision. They must also work ...