Championing user needs
Product managers should champion user needs within the team and within the organisation. They aren’t the only ones, of course, everyone should, but product managers can bring together multiple perspectives on meeting user needs because they don’t represent a specialist discipline.
User needs can be general and specific. So, whilst the specific user needs might be for a user researcher to discover and champion, it’s for a product manager to champion the general user needs. These are the kinds of things user’s need but a user researcher wouldn’t find out; things like making a product accessibility, making it work on various devices, how secure their account should be, etc., etc. In old money, they used to call these Non Functional Requirements, but for modern, user-centred product teams that term is too loaded with tech-first organisational needs, so better that we remind ourselves that it’s our users that need these things by calling them user needs.
Because product managers often think at scale, these general user needs have to be expressed in more generalisable terms. This is where standards, concepts and theories such as cognitive load theory, WCAG, COM-B behaviour change model, OWASP top ten, etc., become an important part of meeting those general user needs.
Championing these general user needs means working with the team to internalise them to the point where they are a given. When the team designs and builds accessibility, security, etc., in from the start, then they are meeting those general user needs. Then they are being user-centred. Then the product manager knows they’ve done the job of championing user needs.