

Finally, the product manager is expected to track industry trends and the competitive landscape as they pertain to her product. The product manager must also contribute to the product team a deep knowledge of our users and customers, and the data about how our customers engage with our products. This means that the product manager must contribute to her product team a solid knowledge of the various constraints of the business – constraints from marketing, sales, service, finance, legal, and privacy are typical examples. While the product designer is accountable for ensuring the solution is usable, and the engineers are accountable for ensuring the solution is feasible, the product manager is accountable for ensuring the solution is both valuable and viable.
Group product manager how to#
We staff our product teams with the skills necessary to come up with effective solutions that are valuable (our customers choose to buy or use), viable (the solution works within the many constraints of the business), usable (the user can figure out how to use) and feasible (our engineers have the skills and technology to implement). Our product teams are cross-functional and durable, generally comprised of a product manager, a product designer, and several engineers. We empower our product teams to solve hard problems – customer problems and business problems – in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business. Note: You may notice that there’s no requirement here for specific domain knowledge, and that’s intentional, and not just an effort to keep this job description generic. If your company is trying to transition to truly empowered product teams, then this is one of the most important things to get right. So finally I decided to just write out a very explicit job description, calling out the important differences. It’s still a decent description, but I also think it’s true that many potential candidates don’t catch all the cues and important differences between the PM role as it’s defined on a typical feature team, and a PM on an empowered product team.

One of the most common requests I’ve received over the years is to share a good job description for a product manager of an empowered product team.Īnd for about as long as I can remember, I’ve forwarded on the job description that Google uses.
