What is product management?

The role of Product Management is to facilitate movement in the direction set by strategic leadership by:

  • Managing the interface between the organisation and the customer to align customer value with business objectives.
  • Managing integration within the organisation, vertically between strategic leadership and technical delivery and horizontally between teams and functions across the organisation, to .
  • Managing the feedback loops from the interface and the integrations to affect strategic direction.

Product manager is a temporary role whilst companies learn to interface with their customers and integrate their other functions.

If a company had all its teams and functions fully integrated and pointed at providing value for customers would it still need specific teams with that focus? Product teams solve a specific organisational problem, if that problem is solved another way then there is no need for those teams.