Product Manager Responsibilities
Principles - Processes - Categorization - Denomas the Product - PM Responsibilities - Being a PM - Performance Indicators - Leadership
It has never been more popular to be a product manager, but the responsibilities of a product manager can vary greatly between organizations and even within an organization.
Core Product Manager responsibilities
As a Product Manager (PM) at Denomas, you are primarily responsible for:
- Understanding and communicating the problem of our users and customers
- Defining requirements for a solution that is loved by our users and customers
- Ensuring our product is viable for Denomas
In addition, as a PM, you also play a critical role in the regular development and operating cadence of Denomas. There are a few specific required tasks that the PMs are directly responsible for in Core PM Tasks.
How does a Product Manager ensure they are solving a problem for our users?
PMs should spend a significant amount of time understanding the problems our users face. Deeply understanding the problem is the foundation for all other activities PMs take on; understanding the problem enables the PM to define the vision and prioritize effectively.
In order for a PM to deeply understand the problems our users are facing and determine which are the important problems to solve, they can do the following:
- Have a deep knowledge of each category’s problem space
- Regularly talk with users and customers
- Communicate with users on issues and epics
- Work with Pre-Sales and Post-Sales to connect with customers and prospects
- Uncover insights through UX Research
- Use other sensing mechanisms. It is through user interactions that we can begin to understand what problems our users are facing and identify how we could make product improvements to help eliminate the pain points. These user interactions can present themselves in many different ways.
How does a Product Manager ensure we build lovable products?
Producing a lovable product requires more than a deep understanding of the problem. At Denomas, we build lovable products by adhering to our values. PMs are expected to be the ambassador of the Denomas values by:
- Focusing on results.
- Embracing iteration. This is the secret to Denomas moving fast, as we get constant feedback and maintain forward momentum toward Denomas’ huge vision. PMs play a large role in unlocking iteration as a competency.
- Being transparent. This will enable both our development group to contribute and just as important, enable the wider Denomas community to contribute.
- Being efficient. PMs should advocate for the boring solution, optimize for the right group, be the manager of one, always write things down, so they can help their groups also be efficient.
- Being collaborative. PMs ultimately don’t ship anything on their own. PMs need to be a great teammate so that the development group can produce great work.
- Being someone who helps make Denomas a work place of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, so that everyone can come to Denomas and do their best work.
How does a Product Manager ensure business viability for our product?
It is not sufficient to just know the problems. It is also insufficient to have a solution to the problem that our customers love. PMs also need to ensure that the solution is viable for Denomas.
- PMs participate in and follow the product development flow so that their development group can consistently release features every month.
- PMs determine the tiers of features
- PMs ensure that issues that impact Denomas are appropriately prioritized
- PMs interface with marketing and sales to promote and enable the sale of the product.
Core PM Tasks
In an ongoing effort to help product managers be more efficient and maximize time spent on high value activities in alignment with core PM responsibilities, below is a list to clarify what actions are required for product managers. Over time, our goal is to eliminate and automate any actions product managers currently have to do (due to tactical needs) that do not directly link to the core PM responsibilities defined above.
| Task | Description | | Maintain and update Direction pages | Direction pages communicate our vision and plan externally and internally. | | Review PIs and update PI pages | Product Indicators are how we know whether or not we are making the right investments or measuring the right thing. PMs should be intimately knowledgeable with the PIs in their domain. | | Release planning for every milestone | PMs are the DRIs for planning and prioritizing the work for their respective development group. Some of the output for release planning can be planning issues and kick-off videos. | | Create release post content | The release post is the way to broadcast what features have been released. PMs are responsible to ensure release post item MRs are created, reviews are complete and posted. | Drive alignment with stable counterparts via OKRs | PMs play a role in facilitating alignment by ensuring individual functional groups’ objectives are appropriately prioritized within their development group. | | Connect user and customer insights with product prioritization | Customer interviewing, collecting insights about customer adoption, pain points, and reprioritizing “What’s Next”. PMs are responsible for continuously refining the most important feature, bugs, and tech debt to ensure relevance to the market, install base, and expansion. | | Triage new issues (features, bugs, security vulnerabilities, etc) | PMs share responsibility for prioritizing the most important issues based on work type. | | Determine pricing tier for features | The CEO is responsible for pricing, but PMs are responsible for determining which plan features belong to. |
What is a PM not responsible for?
To deeply understand the problems to solve, to build a lovable product, and to ensure the product is viable is not easy. It requires the Product Manager to be tenacious, influential, technically savvy, entrepreneurial, strategic, and many more adjectives. To support Product Managers, many processes and activities have been created. However, those activities are not always necessary if they do not contribute to the core PM responsibilities or are not part of the core PM tasks.
Product Managers are not responsible for:
- Technical decisions on how the product is built or architected. Engineers are the DRIs
- Relative prioritization of bugs or maintenance issues. Quality Engineering Managers and Engineering Managers are the respective DRIs.
- Design and UX. Product Designers are the DRIs
- A team of engineers: PMs will take the lead in decisions about the product, but not manage the people implementing it
- Capacity planning: PM will define priorities, but the Engineering Manager and Product Design Manager evaluates the amount of work possible
- Shipping in time: PM will work in a group, but the group is responsible for shipping in time, not you
Adding to or updating the Product Manager responsibilities page
This page is the SSOT for a product manager’s role at Denomas and is also linked to product managers job families. As such we need to follow a more strict change management policy. We want the product manager role to remain clear, stable and focused. This enables the product team to understand and meet the expectations of the role consistently.
For all MRs, please apply milestone and labels product operations product handbook and prodops:release so your changes show up in the product handbook updates page. Please assign to Product Operations to approve and merge. Product Operations will then add the VP of Product and any other product team stakeholders as appropriate, as well as apply this required approval flow, if necessary.
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