“What value do you folks even bring?” is a question my engineers have genuinely asked me more than once so far in my career.

Even as product managers (PMs) have grown in popularity over the past decade, the same issue looms across the industry: it’s hard to define the aforementioned value up-front when asked for.

Product managers are important and their growth only rises

According to Zippia, there are over 41k PMs, just in the US alone. Based on numbers from Product Board, there were only 13.4k PMs in the country back in 2017. To make things more eye-opening, between 2017 and 2019, PM job openings in the US alone had already grown in a frenzy: 32% growth from 13.4k to 17.8k. If we factor in the 41k PMs in the US now, that’s a 230% growth in the past 3 years. This is just a small stat relative to whatever we find globally. This begs an intriguing topic: why are PM jobs in such high demand when some can’t even pin point the exact value they bring?

Let’s call-out one key statement: If a product team is smaller, or the company itself reflects that of start-up territory, then perhaps PMs can leave a more tangible mark. Like a true “jack-of-all-trades” individual, many hats would be worn, and it’d be hard to hide their contributions in moments of success. This is justified with the idea that PMs aren’t just “PMs” in such smaller teams — they’re a bit of everything (even software development if the skills are there). After all, teams have to be more fluid and flexible when it comes to “job responsibilities” to embrace the chaos of start-up growth.

So what happens to the thousands of other PMs who don’t work in a start-up environment or focus the majority of their time on actual “product” work? When teams scale, things change drastically: the value a PM brings to a product team becomes blurred.

Now on paper, it’s easy to explain what PMs do. We drive product direction, define strategy and (sometimes) marketing, and everything in between. We make life easier for our engineers and ensure what the team is building aligns with leadership and product success. We work with others (including designers) to solve the “why,” the “what,” the “where” and even the “when,” while engineers figure out the “how.”

Yet again, this becomes blurred into the abyss when theory crashes into practicality. Perhaps some may think our work is too abstract or conceptual, or that our position could be replaced by a dev lead.

Examples may be the best way to explain

To answer this question, instead of diving into theoretical explanations, I’ll give two realistic examples:

Example 1:

Tom is a PM at Google, working on the Google Suite of products, and in particular, a feature that aims to better integrate Sheets features with Google Ads more seamlessly. One scenario he’s focusing on in the coming quarter is refactoring the current system of Ads and then building a pipeline for a frontend feature which would come next year.

Tom is a PM whose role has many nuances: he helps define the product vision and tracks the work items needed to get sh*t done by the end of the quarter, but he also does hundreds of tasks in-between which get lost in the weeds:

• Supporting scrums by tracking all blocking issues that arise and initiating brainstorming sessions on potential solutions.
• Tracking the analytics to ensure his scenario of the product runs smoothly while they also focus on building new features.
• Doing lots of product discovery work: dogfooding his own features, interviewing users, analyzing his data, or even engaging with engineers on better ways to improve the system design in the near future.
• Handling support requests and thousands of emails per week from managers, external teams, users, and other stakeholders while delegating rightful owners.
• Drafting a monthly newsletter which gets sent to thousands of other GSuite PMs, sharing best practices or feature collaboration ideas.

Much of Tom’s work may not generate a return on investment (ROI) straight away, but his downstream impact is certainly almost guaranteed.

Example 2:

Suzan is a Technical Product Manager (TPM) at Microsoft Gaming, working on a scenario that drives player trust and safety across all Xbox games and platforms. This quarter, they’re working on integrating a few Xbox online safety and privacy settings across some in-house PC games that aren’t available on the Xbox platform. This could improve player safety usage for PC games to +10% in CTR (click-thru rate) and +12% in DAU (Daily Active Users) by Q3 of 2023.

Suzan works on an array of tasks, ranging from:

• Drafting quarterly product plans together with other PMs and dev leads. She gives valuable feedback on requirement documents when necessary, and drafts many of her own to keep her ideas safely stored.
• She runs her team’s daily and weekly scrums and even dabbles with technical details with her engineers to ensure work items are prioritized appropriately. She understands the technical limitations but challenges her developers’ perceptions by providing sufficient ROI for completing hard tasks.
• If there’s a blockage and parts of her area may be “at-risk” from completion by end of quarter, she’ll report this immediately to her product director and act accordingly, protecting her developers in the meantime.
• She monitors the product metrics daily — and even spends time coming up with new sensible metrics on her own. In the past quarter, they already established a telemetric pipeline to measure the success rate of each privacy feature, which she defined together with the dev leads. This will help measure the success of her new integration.

And again, who knows what else they’re working on to help grow their product both organically and inorganically?

Conclusion

Lest I say PMs are more valuable than other functions — which obviously screams of ignorance. But I will say that PMs are invaluable assets to many product teams, especially turbulent teams that lack a foundational backbone to build for business success. Dev leads, engineers, designers, marketers — we all need them when a product team scales, and even in smaller teams as long as the ROI is clear.

I hope with this article and the above examples, I was able to showcase the nuanced pieces that explain why PMs are unique and important!

About Me

My name is Kasey, AKA J.X. Fu (pen name).

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