However, what better way is there to gain a complete understanding of what exactly a Product Manager does than to hear from the horse’s mouth - seasoned Product Managers themselves. So we had a few Product Managers tell us the role of a Product Manager based on their experiences. Read below:

“The role of a product manager is a combination of being a detective (because they’re curious and good at discovering things about people); a quarterback (because they’re able to look around and recognise opportunities others don’t see); a stitcher (because they’re good at connecting the dots between disciplines, teams, global trends and personal expertise); an optimiser (because they can understand all the pieces of the puzzle, notice gaps and how to fill them); and an empath (because they’re human-centered and they relate deeply with people & their experiences)” – Lisa Zane

“The Product Manager’s job is to pull everyone together and figure it out, quickly and efficiently as a team. It’s also to adjudicate, negotiate, and get a consensus while making sure that people are heard”. – Sam Legge

“The Product Manager is the one who drives all the initiatives and talks to customers; sets the vision and the strategy and creates the roadmap; influences engineers and designers and carries out the user research” – Diego Granados

“As a type of Product Manager, I work with stakeholders and focus on go-to market strategies. I analyze the value proposition of the product and best marketing channels for them. Then I work with the sales team to equip them with knowledge via trainings and support materials to make sure they can deliver the product to the users”- Alex Quyen Le

“The role of any Product Manager really, is to get the voices and opinions that are happening from the design point of view, tech point of view and even the business point of view. To determine whether the product is feasible to build and to come up with what direction the team should go in.” – Dominic Stephenson

“A Product Manager owns everything yet controls nothing that’s why their major role is influencing without authority” –Jae Taylor

“The primary responsibility of the product manager is to advocate for the customer and bridge gaps. In whatever sector they’re in, they must bridge the gap between the industry, the teams and the customers. The PM must understand the product, product goals and customer.” – Aniththa Umamahesan

“When I worked as a Product Manager, my job was to get stakeholder management input and advocate for the user. I had to keep up communication between the team and the external stakeholders, updating them along the way and ensuring that the website we were working on aligned with their needs. I was also responsible for keeping the team on track, supporting them and setting deadlines” – Rachel Siu

The Product Manager sits at the intersection of solving consumer problems, with technology and doing it as part of a business. As part of the day-to-day tasks, first you’re a coach saying “I want us to win this match by this many goals”, yet you’re not even playing in the game. You’re setting a vision and empowering the players who include engineers, designers, data scientists, marketing etc to do their part. The other part, is the job of the unblocker. How do you moderate differing opinions and shield your team from negative results, or how do you handle work which noone wants to do. These are the sort of issues your work involves.” - Pritika Goyal

The Product Managers quoted above work in all sorts of companies from startups to Google to mixed reality spaces, each of which bring a different flavor of Product Management requirements to the table. As we mentioned earlier, the ingredients are basically the same, it’s the soup you decide to make with it that differs.

You might have noticed that some points kept repeating themselves across these definitions. For one, customer, customer, customer. The Product Manager should be customer-obsessed. It is the customer that determines whether all of the work that you've done is worth it or not. The customer is the most important part of the product.

It’s a complex job, but also pretty doable once you get the hang of it. Plus, it definitely is nice being integral to the process of developing something so completely.

To gain experience as a Product Manager working as part of a cross-functional team in a real-life work environment, register for our next cohort here!