What’s the difference between a product strategy that delights users and one that fails to meet customers’ needs? Often, it’s the product manager.
Product managers drive user understanding, decide which tasks to prioritize, build stellar PM teams, and push for better and better product-market fit.
But how do product managers achieve these outcomes? What do they actually do? And how can they do it better?
This article is here to break it down for you.
Summary
Want to know what product managers do? Product managers work within a product team to lead feasible strategies that meet business goals and satisfy user needs throughout a product’s lifecycle. They find market-fit solutions and guide the product team to deliver these solutions and ensure a product’s success.
Product managers don’t manage projects, perform in-depth technical work, or market the product
Product managers are critical because they have to:
Ensure the product vision remains customer-focused and advocate for users in major product decisions
Connect different stakeholders and act as intermediaries between business, user, and tech objectives
Achieve business objectives and business goals, maximizing revenue and minimizing costs
Maintain product integrity while focussing on genuine opportunities and avoiding shiny distractions
Five product manager skills are:
Strategic thinking
User empathy
Willingness to fail
Leadership
Communication
Contentsquare tools (like Session Replays and Zone-Based Heatmaps) help product managers with continuous user discovery, defining product priorities, and justifying product strategy
What product managers do
A product manager’s job is to articulate and lead product strategies that achieve business objectives, are technically feasible, and meet customer needs. They identify solutions that fit the market and guide a product team to deliver them.
Martin Eriksson, product management superstar and bestselling author, defines product management as “the intersection between business, technology, and user experience,” which means product managers connect business, tech, and user goals.
Product managers occupy a unique role within the product team. They need to be practical 'doer' types willing to roll up their sleeves and make product delivery happen. But they also need to be strategic visionaries who make tough decisions, define the product vision, and inspire their team towards success.
5 key PM roles and responsibilities
The role of a product manager is becoming more strategic and less defined by operations. Modern PMs increasingly focus on strategy, high-level research, and decision-making.
Here are five key roles and responsibilities of a modern PM:
1. Define and align product vision
Product managers define the product vision, deciding which problem to solve, for whom, and when. They research customer data, market trends, competitive analysis, and product viability and feasibility information—and use their research to create a product vision that will delight customers and offer a high ROI.
But defining the product vision is just the first step.
Product managers also need to convince stakeholders to get on board with the vision. This often involves articulating a business case—supported by user data—to get buy-in from executives.
PMs also need to drive alignment within the product team by listening to the team's feedback and ensuring all team members understand and are on board with the why behind the product vision.
2. Understand and advocate for user needs
Product managers live and breathe user needs. The best product managers are in constant dialogue with customers—they try to go deeper into understanding the user experience and unmet customer needs, which can become the basis of new product features or products in the future.
When product managers understand user needs, they can better articulate and advocate for user needs within the organization.
The more user data you can show key stakeholders, the better case you make for your product vision.
Experience Analytics tools (like Contentsquare 👋) bring you closer to your customers and give you rich quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate user needs to your team and stakeholders.
“The work of a product manager is based on understanding customer needs and defining which are the most common and most relevant.
Without a product manager, there would be zero market fit. A minimum viable product becomes a great product when you have someone who is able to listen to what the public wants and from there use the tools and talent of a product team to make it happen.” - Maite Muniz - Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Truora
3. Empower product teams to achieve great outcomes
Product managers are team leaders who try to bring the best out of every product team member. They grow the product team, onboard new members, get the whole team aligned with the product vision and roadmap—and ensure they have the right product experience tools and resources to make it happen.
PMs anticipate, identify, and address roadblocks holding up their team on product delivery, and empower the product team with the ownership and agency to create amazing product outcomes.
4. Prioritize features and backlog
PMs face tough decisions around where to focus resources—they draw on user data to make informed choices about what the next tasks should be, whether fixing bugs, optimizing infrastructure, or developing new features. They weigh up user needs, business goals, and organizational pressure to prioritize the product backlog.
PMs also determine when to do feature delivery sprints and when the focus should be on iterating or optimizing the core product.
Pro tip: when product managers find themselves forced to choose between several seemingly high-impact tasks, a cost of delay analysis (CoD) can help.
A CoD analysis measures how long each task will take against the revenue it will generate, showing how much revenue will be lost by delaying work on each initiative. This can help clarify which initiatives are truly valuable and which won’t make much of an impact.
5. Communicate product status
Product managers typically take the lead on product team meetings (or scrums if you’re agile) to understand how delivery is progressing and anticipate any blockers. Some of the less sexy parts of the job involve documentation—product managers meticulously document everything that happens, writing meeting notes, product specs, and test cases so all team members have a record.
PMs are also responsible for connecting different departments and driving a culture of cross-functional collaboration. They communicate delivery updates and changes in the roadmap to stakeholders across the organization and make a case for why more time or resources may be needed.
What product managers don’t do
Product manager responsibilities can vary from company to company which often generates confusion. While a product manager role is flexible, certain tasks are not the responsibility of a product manager:
Project management
Project managers take control of scheduling, planning, and assigning micro-level tasks. While product managers may control the product timeline, they should focus on tactical, strategic questions and defining priorities rather than managing calendars.
Product manager vs. project manager is one of the most common areas of confusion—partly because the roles sound alike. In some companies, stretched product managers are forced to take on organizational and operational project tasks that shouldn’t define their role.
In-depth tech work
Product managers are usually tech enthusiasts who know the technology landscape inside out and stay up to date with the latest trends. But they’re not programmers, designers, or developers.
Product managers make strategic decisions about which tasks the tech team should tackle, but they don’t do developer activities like writing code or creating mock-ups.
Product marketing
Product managers need to articulate the product value in terms of how it will satisfy user needs. This means confusion can arise around their role in communicating the benefits of new products and features to customers themselves—but that’s a marketing function.
Product managers regularly speak with customers to unearth their underlying needs and understand their experience, but they don’t explain the product to customers, and they don’t do communications or marketing for the product.
Why product managers are critical
Ensure the product vision remains customer-focused
Product managers bring the organization closer to its customers by listening to users and advocating for them in major product decisions.
Without a product manager, different stakeholders pull in different directions. Developers might be focused only on tech feasibility, while marketing might focus on short-term user acquisition at the expense of long-term user retention.
The product manager keeps all of these different priorities in mind but prioritizes what’s best for users. They make sure customer delight is the North Star guiding all product decisions.
Connect different stakeholders
Product managers act as intermediaries between several different organizational stakeholders with their unique role at the intersection of business, user, and tech objectives.
PMs can translate and articulate different objectives, needs, and visions so they’re mutually intelligible. This creates a strong culture of cross-functional alignment and helps ensure product development and tech teams don’t end up in organizational silos.
“As a PM, my main function was communicating cross-functionally between business and engineering teams, making sure that expectations were clear and that we had a consistent way of measuring progress via KPIs.
Without a product manager, there would be a large communication gap and quite possibly engineers would be in a very separate world from upper management as there would be no one to translate between them.” - Matthew Ramirez - Director of Product at WriteLab, Founder at Rephrase Media, Paraphrase
Help achieve business objectives
PMs tie product metrics to business goals and measure success across a range of targets like profitability and revenue metrics, and retention rate and lifetime value. This combined expertise helps them find solutions that target both user needs and business objectives, maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.
Product managers are plugged into market trends, which means they play a valuable role in determining which tools, features, and optimizations will generate a strong ROI.
Maintain product integrity over time
Product managers distinguish between shiny distractions and genuine opportunities. They focus on what the market really needs and keep user experience streamlined and clear.
As the user base and market grow, many product teams experience pressure to overload the product with tons of new features. Novel features can help products reach new market segments or cater to edge cases—but without careful planning, the clarity and integrity of the original product vision can get lost.
What are the different types of product managers?
Technical product managers work with internal teams on complex products. Usually a former developer, engineer, DevOps, or data scientist. Sometimes partnered with a PM who focuses on external efforts like PR and marketing.
API product managers usually work with developer communities, as well as marketing and sales teams
UX product manager: a natural choice for a UX designer who wants to get into product management
Hardware product manager: a good fit for someone who has experience with partnerships and relationships with vendors
AI product manager: a great role for a data science engineer curious about solving customer problems with artificial intelligence
Growth product manager: experiments with funnel metrics and UX along with the sales and marketing teams
Startup product managers handle everything in the company, which can be exciting, but they may have to create their own support network to learn and grow
Enterprise product managers manage smaller part of a large product. Has less independence than a startup PM, but with a less hectic pace, and sees their product impact on a grand scale.
What makes a great product manager?
Excelling as a product manager requires a unique mix of hard and soft skills. Here are the hard skills aspiring PMs should focus on developing:
Data analysis: use tools like Contentsquare to diagnose problems, reduce churn, personalize user interaction, and correlate user behaviors with long-term value. (Learn more in our guide to product analytics.)
A/B testing: split testing everything—site design, marketing offers, ad headlines, product descriptions—to see what’s most likely to make people click and convert.
Conversion rate optimization: improve conversion rates by ensuring the product is targeting the right audience, work efficiently, and create an experience of clear value to each user. (Interested in CRO? Learn all about it in our complete guide!)
UX design: understand the principles of good UX design and how they mesh with business objectives, and how time or technology constraints affect the product.
Market research: test product and feature viability by communicating with users and collecting their feedback
Roadmap planning and prioritization: streamline the product by analyzing data, ranking initiatives according to highest value, and get stakeholder consensus
Agile product development: build the product using sprint dev cycles, iterating on the released product and using customers feedback to make improvements.
Artificial intelligence: this is one to grow on—AI is considered one of the most important hard skills for PMs to learn in the next decade
The soft skills a great product manager brings to the table are interpersonal communication, storytelling abilities, creative thinking, and empathy. And perhaps most important, the ability to influence cooperation without the authority to enforce it. PMs are sometimes called ‘CEO of the product,’ but they do have to answer to key stakeholders—including the actual CEO. Let’s take a look at some of these soft skills product managers need:
User empathy: there’s no substitute for listening to your users and caring deeply about their experience. Stellar product managers always aim to go one step deeper. They don’t stop at analyzing their users’ behavior but dig to unearth their real underlying needs.
Willingness to fail: successful PMs create a culture where all team members are willing to challenge their assumptions. Rather than getting fixated on certain products, tasks, or roadmaps, the best product managers use key user research techniques to constantly engage with customers and test their assumptions.
Strong leadership: a product manager is only as good as their product team. Top product managers empower the product team to take ownership of the product roadmap—they involve the team in key product decisions, listen to their concerns and insights, and make them feel valued.
Pro tip: take a data-driven approach to improve your product team’s experience.
Empathy isn’t only for your customers—and neither is discovery. Spend time understanding how your product team works best and what individual employees’ strengths and stresses are.
Don’t depend only on structured team meetings. Get proactive and send your team quick check-in surveys at key points in the product cycle or at weekly intervals. Ask them brief, ad-hoc questions about their workload, relationship with colleagues, and concerns.
Incredible communication skills: product management stars convey information to different audiences concisely, precisely, and effectively. They know which issues require a full team meeting and which can be explained in an email or video. Crucially, excellent PMs understand what’s important to the different stakeholders they communicate with. They tailor their message to the core objectives of their audience, and they back up their communications with user and business data.
By now it's clear that PMs are balancing and managing a lot of responsibilities. Here are three ways Contentsquare can help them excel in their roles, and create products users love:
3 ways Contentsquare helps product managers excel in their roles
Here are three ways Contentsquare helps product managers:
1. Continuous user discovery and market research
Contentsquare helps product managers understand the people and market their product serves with tools like:
Feedback
Net Promoter Score® Surveys
Exit Intent Surveys
Heatmaps
![[Visual] Zoning and Heatmaps](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/1fY6bBg1dnmmchw0aGq0u7/22f31b8e8a5bd586dce9a6df783184a1/Screenshot_2024-11-04_at_18.31.54.png?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps help product teams understand how people use their product, what drives interaction, and where users get stuck
2. Defining product priorities
Contentsquare’s tools provide quantitative and qualitative experience insights that product managers can use to ensure they’re making the right decisions about what to prioritize:
Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer tools help you validate hypotheses about user needs and give you confidence in your priorities
Zone-Based Heatmaps and Session Replays offer a visual representation of where users are spending time so you can quickly identify high-priority features. They can also indicate where customers are getting stuck in the user journey, alerting you to bugs, broken links, or other friction points that need to be addressed ASAP.
3. Justify product strategy
Product managers need to show how their product vision will contribute to the organization’s business, user, and tech objectives:
Voice of Customer tools let you collect rich VoC data so you can craft a compelling case for prioritization. Armed with Contentsquare’s user statistics and real customer quotes, you'll have an advantage in getting buy-in from execs.
Session Replays give you key insights into the user’s journey. By quantifying their pain points, you can make a strong case for what needs to be changed.
The impact of product managers
It takes effort—and the right tools—to excel as a product manager. PMs walk a delicate tightrope between user, business, and tech priorities, and it can be tough to stay balanced.
Contentsquare’s experience analytics tools help product managers stay connected to their users, confidently make the right product decisions, and craft compelling stories to get company buy-in.
All the effort is worth it when product managers see their product vision realized—and customers delighted.
Product Manager FAQ
What does a product manager do?
Product managers lead product teams and articulate and guide product strategies to achieve business objectives and meet customer needs. PMs identify the solutions that best fit the market and guide teams to deliver them.
Why are product managers important for organizations?
Product managers are crucial to organizations because they connect business and tech teams for better collaboration, advocate for user needs, and ensure the product vision remains user-focused as it grows and develops. They also help achieve business objectives like profitability and customer retention through their expertise on users and product-market fit.
How can I be a better product manager?
You can become a better product manager by
Learning to think strategically and make sound, data-driven decisions
Cultivating empathy for your users
Being willing to constantly refine your ideas based on user needs
Empowering your product team
Developing stellar communication skills
What is the average salary for a product manager?
Maybe you jumped ahead to read this line first 😉 Like any job, salaries depend on location and years of experience. The average product manager salary in the United States is $108,992. Demand for PMs has been steadily rising over the past few years. Glassdoor currently has tens of thousands of active job listings for product managers in the US, with a salary range of $65,000 to $175,000! Compared to many other jobs, in and out of tech, product management is a well-paid career path with potential for a very bright future.
What kind of perks do PMs enjoy?
While not every PM works for a trendy Silicon Valley company, the benefits are usually pretty good. There are PM roles in just about every field, from healthcare to agriculture to traditional consumer goods companies. In a recent survey, two-thirds of PMs polled enjoy flexibility around their location or hours. Nearly half of PMs reported having wellness initiatives, and more than a third get an education stipend. (In reality, this number may be much higher. Many companies have discretionary funds allocated for employee training.) Most of the PMs who reported having educational funding at their company had less than four years in a PM role, making training more available to those with less PM experience.
How do you get started becoming a product manager?
Something that’s true about most jobs, but especially product management, is that companies want to see experience. So if you have no experience yet, what can you do? If you’re already working at a company, start there. Talk to your company’s PMs and offer to help out. Ask about challenges they’re facing, and volunteer to work on experiments and solutions. Take on an extracurricular project that you can own, and run tests and take notes. If you can document your initiative, leadership, and participation in a project, you’ve got something great to talk about in a PM interview.
Outside of work, you can enroll in a product management certification course. Hubspot has compiled a useful list of programs available to budding PMs from leading schools and organizations. You can also look into Associate Product Management (APM) programs, which are roles offered to new and junior-level product managers. Somewhere between a job and an internship, these temporary roles can lead to full-time employment. Many of the top enterprise and FAANG companies offer APM roles.
And once you’re ready for the job market, nearly 40% of PMs hire through job portals like LinkedIn. Online job boards are a go-to for many people searching for their next step. Another way PMs hire is through their personal network, which makes networking a very valuable activity—you never know which doors might open for you. Product management is global, and there’ll certainly be events near you. In the U.S. and Europe, you also have #ProductCon, the quarterly product conference.