Product Manager responsibilities

What are the product manager responsibilities? What needs to be done when? What is the role of Product Management?

Product managers come from various disciplines—engineering, marketing, sales, etc.—leading to a patchwork understanding of their roles. Without a standardized pathway into product management, these professionals bring different perspectives, skills, and interpretations of what a product manager is in charge of, causing inconsistencies in role expectations and responsibilities.
The specific responsibilities of a product manager can greatly vary between organizations based on their focus—be it technical specifications in engineering-heavy companies or market-oriented roles in sales-driven firms. This divergence leads to ambiguity, as one product manager's duties might look very different from another's based solely on the company's structure and priorities.
The pressures of day-to-day operational tasks often overshadow strategic responsibilities. As managing directors express dissatisfaction with the lack of actionable insights from product management, product managers become overwhelmed with tactical responsibilities at the expense of long-term planning and decision-making. This creates a vicious cycle where their role becomes increasingly reactive rather than proactive.

Why is there a lack of clarity about the responsibilities of product managers?
Often, the product manager's role is not clearly articulated to other departments or even within the PM function itself. This lack of communication leads to misunderstandings about what product managers should focus on, as stakeholders may expect them to fulfill task roles that are not aligned with strategic product management. As mentioned earlier, most product managers transition from other departments without receiving formal product management training that outlines what, when, and how tasks should be carried out.
Unlike professions such as nursing, bricklaying, or policing with established training and certification programs, product management lacks a cohesive and universally recognized educational. This absence means that newcomers often rely on ad-hoc learning rather than a comprehensive grasp of best practices and foundational knowledge that clearly delineates their responsibilities.

To address this gap, our Product Management courses, provide training with help of the Open Product Management Workflow™ and its tools, gaining insights into their responsibilities and how to execute them professionally. The courses also elucidate the objectives of each step, their interconnections, and how they contribute to creating fact-based decision templates for management and all other departments.

Product Manager's role and responsibilities in the Workflow

In order to be able to explain the responsibilities of product managers more simply, we use the Open Product Management Workflow™ to help. By the way, that Workflow was developed by us, because in our practical work with product managers in companies we have repeatedly experienced that our colleagues find it difficult to perform tasks and work in the correct order.

Let's take a look at the workflow. At a glance you will notice numerous boxes representing distinct product management responsibilities. These task boxes are divided into three colors. Each color stands for a task section that effectively outlines the activity and role of the corresponding product manager.

The blue section contains all strategic, innovative and business-related responsibilities in product management. Consequently, this section is also commonly referred to as „Strategic Product Management“.
The main objective of the tasks in this section is to help derive market-driven strategies and create decision templates.
It is important to note that all activities within the strategic section serve as the foundation for other activities and sections, including Technical Product Management and Go-to-Market.

The time that the product management invests in the responsibilities of the strategic part reduces the wasted time for tactics.

As a product manager, your starting point is to gather information directly from the customers. Your main objective is to identify the specific problem that causes customers to lose time and/or money and determine if they are willing to pay for a solution to this problem.
It is important to establish a balanced perspective that takes into account the relationships between your company's existing customers, the customers of your competitors, and potential customers.
For easier orientation, the individual responsibilities in Open Product Management Workflow™ have been grouped into different phases once again - see bottom bar.

Consequently, the interview phase is consistently followed by the phase of identifying the problem, persona, and scenario. Subsequently, the analysis phase ensues, which plays an important role in deriving the specific strategies to be implemented.
The phase check helps to determine business success with the help of key performance indicators and to check the type and value of innovations. Additionally, it aids in making strategic decisions regarding the "Build, Buy, or Partner?" approach - whether to develop internally, acquire, or collaborate with external entities. It is essential to note that this decision-making process extends beyond technology and can also impact choices related to markets, sales channels, and communication channels.
By leveraging all the information derived from these product management responsibilities, one can now formulate necessary strategies.
The last step in strategic product management is the consolidation phase, i.e. the summary of results and derivations in the form of a business plan with calculated figures, the business case.
In order to ensure that the business plan encompasses only market facts that can be constantly and flexibly adjusted, product managers have the opportunity to participate in our Product Management courses with Software. By utilizing our provided templates and tools, individual product management responsibilities can be effectively executed, leading to fact-based decision-making templates that can be incorporated into the business plan.

Free trial Software

You as one product manager can use our software,   Product Management Dashboard® for Jira 3 months for free, which is based on the Open Product Management Workflow™.

Become up to 50% faster and 100% market-oriented in product management with clear responsibilities, tasks and a unified, structured work with automated tools for strategy, technology and marketing with following advantages:

• "My Tasks & Responsibilities" as well as all deadlines until completion at a glance and finish immediately with the right tool.
• Get in 2 hours your 100% market fact based strategies and Agile Business Plan™ as a PowerPoint incl. management summary
• Prioritize all requirements automatically in 1 second based on strategy, customer benefit, revenue and time
• Find all information about the product in seconds, because everything is in one place
• Consolidation and automatic evaluation of all ideas and market information from various sources such as customers, sales, management, technology and support in one central location
• Product management teams can work and manage the work together on one or more products
• Direct transfer of market requirements as product requirements to development
• Implement a successful Go-to-Market together as a team, i.e., distribute and complete tasks and monitor results

Tasks and esponsibilities in the technical part

The orange section of the Open Product Management Workflow™ covers the Technical Product Management and contains all the responsibilities and role of a technical product manager or the product owner.

If the strategic product management responsibilities have been insufficiently completed, there will always be requests from the development department, the prioritization will often be changed by the management or sales department or the product manager will be pushed into it. This leads to dissatisfaction in development and with the product manager himself.

Successful Go-to-Market 

The green section of Open Product Management Workflow™ contains all the responsibilities that need to be fulfilled for a Successful Go-to-Market.

Product manager responsibilities are versatile, above all not only business management or technical. If you want to have a deeper insight into the responsibilities of a product manager and want to learn the tools that enable product managers to complete all tasks professionally, then download our books for free and visit our Product Management courses, get the certification and become a Product Management Professional.

Continue reading the next article Product Management problems and solutions or look at our product management job descriptions.

Overview: Articles and information for product managers