I’ve seen descriptions of product manager responsibilities from many people, such as a product CEO and product owner. But here’s a more accurate description from Josh Elman on Medium today:

Help your team (and company) ship the right product to your usersCopy the code

Josh Elman divided this explanation into five parts, which can be said to be properly divided, without being too detailed to see the whole picture, and without being vague.

(1)Help your team

Product managers generally spend a large part of their energy on this part, but sometimes other positions are not so familiar with it, which can be explained.

The product manager is the team’s primary planner, decision maker, and coordinator. Help the team to understand the product status, define the vision of the product, give a clear product goal, so that the team can communicate and work around the unified goal. However, many people say that the product manager is the product owner, which may be a lot of pressure, and may be suspected of taking over the responsibility of other team members. We believe that engineers writing codes and designers drawing design drawings are also responsible for the product, so the responsibility for the product should be borne by the whole team. What the product manager should do is to drive the team cooperation.

(2)and company

As a product manager, you know more about the direction of the company, the vision of the product, and how the team can best serve the direction of the company than any other member of the team. Therefore, product managers need to be able to manage by objectives, disassemble goals, develop release strategies, and have the awareness and ability to manage risks.

(3)ship

There’s nothing better than having a product that works for your users, and you need to help the team understand what’s important, help the team understand what’s good, and then of course you need to know how to deliver it to the users. For users, products don’t exist if they don’t see them, and even if they go to Download pages, they leave without understanding what the product solves.

(4)the right product

A good product manager lets the team know what a good product is. Creating something that didn’t exist before gets the team excited, but shouldn’t get caught up in it. Let the team know what problems we are trying to solve, let the team know the current predicament and market status quo, let the team clearly see who to serve. By understanding this, the team can understand how to design the right product.

(5)to your users

The user is the core of the core of the product, not the requirement, not the function. Product managers need to go out among users, not only to do questionnaires and interviews, but also to observe users’ lifestyles and common problems. In my own experience, stability is a rare quality, and most products are eager to release new features, regardless of user experience and understanding. By focusing on the users themselves, we can better understand the product, know how to make the product reach the users, solve the problems in the life of users, and make life better and better.

I don’t know how you feel after reading this description, my feelings have been elaborated above, is there anyone willing to talk with you? Contact me on Twitter at 😏