Product Manager Day-to-Day Responsibilities

I started building my first product in 2009. Back then, the term Product Management was something that almost did not exist as much as it resonates with everyone today. Fast forward to today, I have learned a ton about building, shipping, and managing a product.

If you are a new product manager or an aspiring product manager looking for new opportunities, this one is for you. Here's a knowledge dump about what a product manager at the product management group in a company do on a day-to-day basis.

What are product managers' responsibilities?

Summary:

A product manager is a go-to person who understands the customer needs and bridge them to the business needs of the product to build the right feature at the right time. A product manager sets the product up for success with critical trackable metrics.

In brief:

Typically in a small product company, the CEO sets the business goals, and rallies the company to work towards that goal for the good of the business. A product manager is somewhere along the lines of the CEO, where they set goals and targets that are helps customers achieve what they want, by building the right product which meets the goals of the CEO.

In most cases, the product manager is the one who rallies the team around to build the features that are set to make the customers successful in what they want to achieve with your product.

What is the role of a Product Manager?

While there is so much for a product manager to do in an organization, it all boils down to these roles for a product manager:

1. Know team's strengths and weakness
2. Understand customer's pain points and product value
3. Layout a roadmap for the product and revise when in need
4. Prioritize customer feedback with feature voting tools
5. Align customer needs with business goals
6. Measure and estimate how long a feature would take to build
7. Ensure the quality of the feature before the customer uses it

Who is a Product Owner?

A product owner is someone who is aligned heavily towards the business side of the product. They are responsible for:

1. Helping teams execute product vision
2. Execute the success plan outlined by product manager
3. Own the product development lifecycle
4. Does the ground-work to build features on a day-to-day basis
5. Materialize business goals and optimize team efficiency

If you are someone who is up to build great products and have an impact, you could be the greatest product manager of all-time. Just put your heads down and focus on quality by obsessing over your customers, and things will fall into place. This kind of focus has worked out for me at Hellonext. I hope it works out for you too.

Drop me an email at karthik@hellonext.co if you need to talk more about product management.