The ultimate in Product Manager job descriptions

Distilling the essence of product management into a handful of phrases

Marty Cagan is a Silicon Valley-based product executive with more than 20 years of experience with industry leaders including eBay, AOL, Netscape Communications and Hewlett-Packard.

In 2020 Marty wrote, “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. “ He responded to this request and I’ve included below the full description that he devised.

I enjoy Marty’s work, and was excited to have heard him talk at an event in London not too long ago, and there are a few phrases in the job description that I think really capture the essence of product management.

It’s very easy for PMs to simply solve problems, but you always need to strike a balance between finding solutions that the customers really engage with and which also make sense for the way your organization works.

There’s no point delighting customers and bankrupting your business, or making the organizational administrators happy whilst watching your customers walk out of the door. You need to find the balance.

This idea of constraints is often overlooked when considering product management. It’s easy to conjure up the idea of a product manager trawling through the analytics, identifying an area for improvement and getting stuck into finding a solution, but there are many considerations before you can consider a solution as viable.

Can we legally ask this of our customers? Can we do this without killing our servers? How do we…

Related posts:

Before getting into the question itself, lets analysis the Art. What is the Art and why we need it or don’t? When we say art the first and foremost thing comes to most of peoples’ mind are pictures…

Em recente contribuição para uma coletânea de artigos dedicados ao falecido teólogo litúrgico Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983), John Witvliet elenca cinco razões pelas quais o pensamento de Schmemann…

Evangelicalism in America is nearing extinction due to the movement’s devotion to politics at the expense of its original calling to share the gospel, according to Mark Galli, former editor-in-chief…