7 ms·

What does a product manager do?

67 points by sudonim 16y ago

A lot of founders don't understand what a product manager does and when to bring one in. This is an attempt at an explanation.

tptacek 16y ago
These are indeed things that product managers do. However, in a software startup, the product manager's portfolio is the founder's portfolio; in other words: you'd better be a good product manager (or be ready to become one). Read Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Don't think about hiring someone into this role until you've done it successfully for your company first.
- torrenegra 16y ago
  I agree. As I commented in the orignal post: "For over five years I've hired four product developers for three different startups I've co-founded. None of them has delivered satisfactory results. I am a perfectionist and that may be part of the issue. I've decided to stick to product development and, instead, hire others to take care of sales, business development, operations, etc. Also, doing product development is what I love the most. I am not that good at interacting face-to-face with others."
sbov 16y ago
I would imagine its hard to hire a good external product manager. I once worked at a small company where the product manager was a new hire, but most of the developers had been around for a long time (4-5 years). In the "food chain" the manager was higher, but after years of experience working on the project and under the founder the developers had a better eye for what worked when it came to implementation.
- btilly 16y ago
  The job of product managers is not to know, it is to learn. Far too many people have that backwards, including product managers. The best ideas rarely come from the product manager. But the best product managers do a good job of finding ideas that are out there in the users, QA department, developers, etc, and figuring out which ones deserve to be tried, how to integrate them into the product, and how to judge their success. I remember one product manager. Her first time being a product manager in software. I handled reporting. Within 3 days I knew she was good. She knew absolutely nothing, but she asked the right questions, and put the answers together in good ways to come up with insights other people hadn't had. I was on my way out the door, but I kept in touch with the company. I was entirely unsurprised that 6 months later she had emerged as a superstar. Still there is always a challenge in telling the difference in an interview between people who are good, and are good at BS. This seems to be particularly true with product managers. But I suspect (never having hired for the position I can only suspect) that digging into their willingness and ability at asking questions is revealing.
  - bfung 16y ago
    Why did you know she was good after 3 days? Do you remember any specifics? What were those "right questions"?
    - btilly 16y ago
      Yes, I remember specifics of how Jenny Kaplan (then Roosa) impressed me. (No need to hide the name of someone I'm complimenting. :-) She was asked to look at our lease reporting process. That was a process that was somewhat complex, under documented, and which nobody had been in charge of for some time. Less than a day later she knew that I was a useful resource. She asked me for any information I had on lease statuses. I sent her a copy of the standard documentation we had on tables, and pointed to where in that there was a list of all statuses you could wind up in during the lease reporting page. She asked me for information about transitions from state to state. I sent her the source code that controlled the set of all possible lease transitions, and included brief descriptions on how to tell when that would trigger emails, etc. (There was no other documentation. Seriously.) She came to me, and said she was trying to prioritize the logic, and we had a brief back and forth discussion about what was available. Perhaps 15 minutes later I had a report for her that listed for each lease transition, how many people had made that transition in some previous time period. The next day she had a diagram that listed the major lease states, the important lease transitions, gave volumes for how people flowed through, and gave how many people's leases ended at each status. She had also prioritized which ones she thought had the most room for improvement. This was by far the best view I'd ever seen on the lease report process in several years at the company. I was impressed with how quickly she had come up with that, and I mentioned this in a conversation with the person who ran QA. Who said, "You're not the first to compliment her. Monica (who handled customer support) has been saying how happy she is to have a product manager who comes and asks questions about what problems people are asking customer support about. I'll be very interested to see what she does with her spec." Jenny started 3 days earlier. Within 3 days of being handed a big hairball of a project, she had managed to impress 2 people in 2 other departments. And when said spec arrived, the comment I got from the head of QA was, "Now THIS is what I wish every spec looked like. Clear. Simple. Too the point. And it looks like it will work."
  - 16y ago
rwhitman 16y ago
Interesting, this week I'm in the interview loop for a PM position at a notable company. I come from a background as a botched startup founder & 'jack of all trades' consultant (developer / designer / project manager / team lead). Anyone have any advice? What challenges would I face in transition?
- mikeryan 16y ago
  Be an active user, passionate about your product. If you don't use it - you lose a ton of effectiveness. If you don't love it, well that's the first thing you need to change.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I was a PM for a couple years at an established startup. The core of the PM job in a company with direct sales is: * Talking to customers * Translating customer-ese into MRD-ese * Negotiating with developers to translate the MRD into (a) a release schedule and (b) a product roadmap, both of which are commitments you'll be giving customers * Being able to make a pretty roadmap slide deck and present it to (a) internal management and (b) customers * Translating slide-deck-ese to marketing-ese (notably, being able to write any concept from use-case through engineering decision to value proposition in terms of "feature/function/benefit") so that marcom can commission sales collateral * Working with sales to figure out what collateral is actually needed, and helping arrange for it to be created * Tag-teaming on sales calls, both as a way to (a) talk to customers (see above) and (b) help account managers out * Coordinating product packaging and pricing (note careful choice of words; product pricing is the deadly radioactive core of the startup money generator and is unlikely to be trusted wholesale to a front-line PM) I list these not because I can hope to help you do the job better or to explain how to do these things, but instead because your interviewing strategy is very straightforward: take each of these tasks and devise 2-3 questions for your interviewer for each of them. You now have a small arsenal of questions; use them to keep control of the interview, while seeming extremely engaged with the job of product management. The answers to some of these questions may also clue you in to what your prospective employer is looking for in a PM. Good "starter" questions (have 2 more detailed questions as backup) include things like: "What's the process by which feature requests are qualified and then transformed into committed dates for customers?" "Do you have a beta program? If so, how does it work, and what's the primary value to the company --- is it a prospecting tool, what percentage of your features and change requests originate in beta, and how do you qualify participants?" "What's your most effective piece of sales collateral, and who wrote it, product management, marketing/communications, or an outside contractor?" You get the idea.
16s 16y ago
Reminds me of a rhetorical question Ted Nugent once asked which he then answered himself, "What does the National Guard do? They guard the nation."
bluishgreen 16y ago
Anyone looking to hire an awesome product manager? Please leave a note here, lets talk!
ashbrahma 16y ago
As a Product manager, I like what Gmail's Todd Jackson said at SXSW about PM's: "You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella..."
- megablast 16y ago
  Not sure which is better form that quote. Someone who protects the company from shit, or someone who funnels the shit away from everybody else in the company?
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    I think you're looking at the quote backwards. It's about protecting (or not) the team working on the product, not the company.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
korch 16y ago
I don't recall what article about startup valuations it was, but it was posted here a few months ago, and one of the pieces of advice was: when valuing a fresh, new startup(< 10 employees), deduct -$200,000 for every product/project manager on the payroll who doesn't also hack code.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  So if Steve Jobs started a new company with no employees, you'd valuate it -$200,000?
  - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
    I will. Steve Jobs had Wozniak partnership , without him he would be not what he is today, he wouldn't had the experience he has(he started very young), either the money and fame. He wouldn't had the opportunity to work with(and learn) from extraordinary people he has. It was a symbiosis because odds are that Woz without Jobs will not be in a very good position. Jobs is an extraordinary seller(distortion field). So yes, if I find a young Jobs without training and even more if it has no employees is at least -$200,000.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I not asking if you had a young Steve Jobs. I'm saying if Steve Jobs today said, "I'm leaving Apple and starting my own company. As of today, I'm the only employee of this new company." He comes to you and says, "I'll give you 50% share for $20" you'd say, "No. Since you don't write code, the company is only worth -$200k". Let me cut to the chase. Valuating companies with stupid formulas, leads to stupid valuations. IMO.
      - brianlash 16y ago
        Jobs is a terrible example. If he founded a company he'd be a finger snap from surrounding himself with an A-List tech team, the likes of which SV VCs only dream about. It's the fact that he could find the talent if he needed it that the valuation would obviously be greater than 0. Your point is moot.
known 16y ago
A product manager should manage the gap between his product and competing product.

67 points by sudonim 16y ago

A lot of founders don't understand what a product manager does and when to bring one in. This is an attempt at an explanation.

tptacek 16y ago

These are indeed things that product managers do. However, in a software startup, the product manager's portfolio is the founder's portfolio; in other words: you'd better be a good product manager (or be ready to become one). Read Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Don't think about hiring someone into this role until you've done it successfully for your company first.

torrenegra 16y ago
I agree. As I commented in the orignal post: "For over five years I've hired four product developers for three different startups I've co-founded. None of them has delivered satisfactory results. I am a perfectionist and that may be part of the issue. I've decided to stick to product development and, instead, hire others to take care of sales, business development, operations, etc. Also, doing product development is what I love the most. I am not that good at interacting face-to-face with others."

sbov 16y ago

I would imagine its hard to hire a good external product manager. I once worked at a small company where the product manager was a new hire, but most of the developers had been around for a long time (4-5 years). In the "food chain" the manager was higher, but after years of experience working on the project and under the founder the developers had a better eye for what worked when it came to implementation.

btilly 16y ago
The job of product managers is not to know, it is to learn. Far too many people have that backwards, including product managers. The best ideas rarely come from the product manager. But the best product managers do a good job of finding ideas that are out there in the users, QA department, developers, etc, and figuring out which ones deserve to be tried, how to integrate them into the product, and how to judge their success. I remember one product manager. Her first time being a product manager in software. I handled reporting. Within 3 days I knew she was good. She knew absolutely nothing, but she asked the right questions, and put the answers together in good ways to come up with insights other people hadn't had. I was on my way out the door, but I kept in touch with the company. I was entirely unsurprised that 6 months later she had emerged as a superstar. Still there is always a challenge in telling the difference in an interview between people who are good, and are good at BS. This seems to be particularly true with product managers. But I suspect (never having hired for the position I can only suspect) that digging into their willingness and ability at asking questions is revealing.
- bfung 16y ago
  Why did you know she was good after 3 days? Do you remember any specifics? What were those "right questions"?
  - btilly 16y ago
    Yes, I remember specifics of how Jenny Kaplan (then Roosa) impressed me. (No need to hide the name of someone I'm complimenting. :-) She was asked to look at our lease reporting process. That was a process that was somewhat complex, under documented, and which nobody had been in charge of for some time. Less than a day later she knew that I was a useful resource. She asked me for any information I had on lease statuses. I sent her a copy of the standard documentation we had on tables, and pointed to where in that there was a list of all statuses you could wind up in during the lease reporting page. She asked me for information about transitions from state to state. I sent her the source code that controlled the set of all possible lease transitions, and included brief descriptions on how to tell when that would trigger emails, etc. (There was no other documentation. Seriously.) She came to me, and said she was trying to prioritize the logic, and we had a brief back and forth discussion about what was available. Perhaps 15 minutes later I had a report for her that listed for each lease transition, how many people had made that transition in some previous time period. The next day she had a diagram that listed the major lease states, the important lease transitions, gave volumes for how people flowed through, and gave how many people's leases ended at each status. She had also prioritized which ones she thought had the most room for improvement. This was by far the best view I'd ever seen on the lease report process in several years at the company. I was impressed with how quickly she had come up with that, and I mentioned this in a conversation with the person who ran QA. Who said, "You're not the first to compliment her. Monica (who handled customer support) has been saying how happy she is to have a product manager who comes and asks questions about what problems people are asking customer support about. I'll be very interested to see what she does with her spec." Jenny started 3 days earlier. Within 3 days of being handed a big hairball of a project, she had managed to impress 2 people in 2 other departments. And when said spec arrived, the comment I got from the head of QA was, "Now THIS is what I wish every spec looked like. Clear. Simple. Too the point. And it looks like it will work."
- 16y ago

rwhitman 16y ago

Interesting, this week I'm in the interview loop for a PM position at a notable company. I come from a background as a botched startup founder & 'jack of all trades' consultant (developer / designer / project manager / team lead). Anyone have any advice? What challenges would I face in transition?

mikeryan 16y ago
Be an active user, passionate about your product. If you don't use it - you lose a ton of effectiveness. If you don't love it, well that's the first thing you need to change.
tptacek 16y ago
I was a PM for a couple years at an established startup. The core of the PM job in a company with direct sales is: * Talking to customers * Translating customer-ese into MRD-ese * Negotiating with developers to translate the MRD into (a) a release schedule and (b) a product roadmap, both of which are commitments you'll be giving customers * Being able to make a pretty roadmap slide deck and present it to (a) internal management and (b) customers * Translating slide-deck-ese to marketing-ese (notably, being able to write any concept from use-case through engineering decision to value proposition in terms of "feature/function/benefit") so that marcom can commission sales collateral * Working with sales to figure out what collateral is actually needed, and helping arrange for it to be created * Tag-teaming on sales calls, both as a way to (a) talk to customers (see above) and (b) help account managers out * Coordinating product packaging and pricing (note careful choice of words; product pricing is the deadly radioactive core of the startup money generator and is unlikely to be trusted wholesale to a front-line PM) I list these not because I can hope to help you do the job better or to explain how to do these things, but instead because your interviewing strategy is very straightforward: take each of these tasks and devise 2-3 questions for your interviewer for each of them. You now have a small arsenal of questions; use them to keep control of the interview, while seeming extremely engaged with the job of product management. The answers to some of these questions may also clue you in to what your prospective employer is looking for in a PM. Good "starter" questions (have 2 more detailed questions as backup) include things like: "What's the process by which feature requests are qualified and then transformed into committed dates for customers?" "Do you have a beta program? If so, how does it work, and what's the primary value to the company --- is it a prospecting tool, what percentage of your features and change requests originate in beta, and how do you qualify participants?" "What's your most effective piece of sales collateral, and who wrote it, product management, marketing/communications, or an outside contractor?" You get the idea.

16s 16y ago

Reminds me of a rhetorical question Ted Nugent once asked which he then answered himself, "What does the National Guard do? They guard the nation."

bluishgreen 16y ago

Anyone looking to hire an awesome product manager? Please leave a note here, lets talk!

ashbrahma 16y ago

As a Product manager, I like what Gmail's Todd Jackson said at SXSW about PM's: "You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella..."

megablast 16y ago
Not sure which is better form that quote. Someone who protects the company from shit, or someone who funnels the shit away from everybody else in the company?
- brown9-2 16y ago
  I think you're looking at the quote backwards. It's about protecting (or not) the team working on the product, not the company.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

korch 16y ago

I don't recall what article about startup valuations it was, but it was posted here a few months ago, and one of the pieces of advice was: when valuing a fresh, new startup(< 10 employees), deduct -$200,000 for every product/project manager on the payroll who doesn't also hack code.

kenjackson 16y ago
So if Steve Jobs started a new company with no employees, you'd valuate it -$200,000?
- forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
  I will. Steve Jobs had Wozniak partnership , without him he would be not what he is today, he wouldn't had the experience he has(he started very young), either the money and fame. He wouldn't had the opportunity to work with(and learn) from extraordinary people he has. It was a symbiosis because odds are that Woz without Jobs will not be in a very good position. Jobs is an extraordinary seller(distortion field). So yes, if I find a young Jobs without training and even more if it has no employees is at least -$200,000.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I not asking if you had a young Steve Jobs. I'm saying if Steve Jobs today said, "I'm leaving Apple and starting my own company. As of today, I'm the only employee of this new company." He comes to you and says, "I'll give you 50% share for $20" you'd say, "No. Since you don't write code, the company is only worth -$200k". Let me cut to the chase. Valuating companies with stupid formulas, leads to stupid valuations. IMO.
    - brianlash 16y ago
      Jobs is a terrible example. If he founded a company he'd be a finger snap from surrounding himself with an A-List tech team, the likes of which SV VCs only dream about. It's the fact that he could find the talent if he needed it that the valuation would obviously be greater than 0. Your point is moot.

known 16y ago

A product manager should manage the gap between his product and competing product.