Clarifying What A Product Manager Actually Does

Let's try to work this out in the product family

The Three Core Things A Product Manager Does

We've always found it rather puzzling how Product Managers have collectively embraced this misleading metaphor: "A product manager is the CEO of the product." You hear this phrase tossed around in interviews or splashed across LinkedIn profiles, pronounced with unnerving certainty, with a soupçon of controversy. While we understand the intention—capturing that blend of responsibility, accountability, and ownership that defines the product role—we've found it ultimately creates more confusion than clarity for you as a product manager.

Over the next few posts, Oji, Ted, and I (Ezinne) will explore what a product manager actually does in the ideal. This is by far the most frequent question to all PMs worldwide from people who are not. Indeed, many entry-level PMs often do simple aspects of product management and don't experience the full arc. We think it’s useful to distill the major arcs of product management from decades of practice.

Let's be honest for a moment. Can you thrive when someone essentially tells you your job is to "do everything" to make your product successful? While that may be true in some philosophical sense, it's like being told to climb a mountain without being shown any of the paths. When everything is your job, nothing is your job. This non-answer needs a better definition.

Over our years mentoring product managers—from bright-eyed startup PMs to seasoned leaders in Fortune 500 companies—we've had the joy of helping codify what "everything" actually means in practice for you. Through countless coffee chats, late-night strategy sessions, and yes, even a few tears of frustration and triumph, we've discovered that the product manager role blossoms when understood through three core functions around creating enterprise value: developing customer-centric products, optimally delivering that product value to customers, and evolving your product (or the value your organization delivers).

1)Creating Customer Value - Product Development

At its beating heart, your job as a product manager is about solving sharp customer problems with a market. This is the function most people immediately picture when thinking of the product management role—that beautiful dance where you bring engineering, product, and design ( and your extended squad of user research product marketing, data analysts, etc.) together to create something valuable.

This function requires you to:

• Develop Customer Intimacy – Building that deep, nuanced understanding of workflows, challenges, and unmet needs through genuine customer connection

• Foster Collaboration – Creating meaningful partnerships with engineers, designers, and other product development disciplines, to craft solutions that are not just viable but truly valuable

• Drive Execution – Ensuring that solutions move from whiteboard dreams to living reality, addressing genuine user problems along the way

This is the product management job most readily recognized—often anchored around what we affectionately call "the original dream team" (aka the EPD triad). Effective product development involves weaving together customer insights, technical possibilities, and business objectives into a coherent product strategy that resonates with real humans.

2) Delivering Customer Value - Customer Experience and Go-To-Market

Your second function extends beyond building the product to ensuring it actually reaches and is used by customers in meaningful ways: either by building GTM into the product through digital touch-points (self-serve products) or in partnership with other functions (sales, account management, etc.) in your organization. As the customer expert within your organization, you own intentionally designing the end-to-end customer journey, from the minute a user lands on your website to helping them through the customer experience and service stumbling blocks they encounter. You are the voice at the table, centering the customer’s needs as the company designs what growth and success need to be to grow its customer base.

In this capacity, you're both orchestrator and advocate:

• Driving Go-to-Market Coordination – Working hand-in-hand with sales, marketing, and customer support to ensure your product's value isn't just built but beautifully communicated and delivered

• Providing Customer Advocacy – Standing tall as the internal voice of the customer, ensuring their experience feels seamless across every touchpoint (because you know how quickly delight can turn to frustration with just one disconnected experience)

• Ensuring Brand and Business Alignment – Supporting revenue growth by making sure the product experience and the value you are generating aligns with your company's broader strategy and brand promise

Because you often have the deepest understanding of the customer journey (and if you don't, that's your first assignment!), you play a crucial role in making sure your product doesn't just exist—it reaches and serves customers successfully. You're the connective tissue ensuring consistency across touch-points and helping other teams understand not just what the product does, but why it matters.

3) Evolving Customer Value - Opportunity Spotting (Innovation and Growth)

Your third function—and perhaps the most exciting, though often the most misunderstood—is identifying new opportunities that others might miss. While product development includes those iterative improvements through build-measure-learn cycles, opportunity spotting takes a broader, more expansive view.

This function involves:

• Embracing Continuous Learning – Diving into the build-measure-learn cycle with genuine curiosity, always asking "what might we discover here?" rather than just "did we hit our metrics?"

• Maintaining Industry Awareness – Keeping your antenna finely tuned to emerging trends, shifts in customer behavior, and technological advancements that present new possibilities

• Driving Strategic Innovation – Discovering those adjacent market spaces, unmet needs, and areas where your company can expand its value proposition

• Anticipating – Cultivating the intuitive ability to recognize customer needs before they're clearly articulated (listening for the whispers before they become shouts)

As you advance to product leadership roles overseeing portfolios of products, this opportunity-finding function becomes increasingly vital to your success. You must cultivate that keen product sense that allows you to identify promising growth opportunities and serve as a hub for new ideas, ensuring your company remains not just competitive but truly forward-thinking. You must think beyond what your teams are building each day and think about the whole market and where it is going.

Moving Forward and Balancing These In The Role

As a product manager, you'll engage in all three of these functions to some degree, but the balance shifts depending on:

• Company Size – In startups, you'll likely be deeply involved in all three areas simultaneously, often switching between them multiple times in a single day

• Product Maturity – New products naturally demand more development focus, while established products may emphasize optimization and exploring new horizons

• Team Structure – In larger organizations, you might find yourself specializing more in one function

• Career Stage – As you grow into senior product leadership, you'll typically spend more time in the opportunity spotting space, guiding portfolio strategy with your accumulated wisdom

Your role isn't about being the "CEO of a product" which, between us, creates more impostor syndrome than clarity. Nor is it the jack-of-all-trades approach, “doing whatever it takes to make the product successful”, which is hard to define and even harder to measure for what success looks like. It comes down to mastering these three beautiful, interconnected functions: building solutions that solve real problems, delivering experiences that create genuine value, and spotting opportunities for your customers that others might miss.

Great product managers—the ones we've had the privilege to mentor and learn from—develop fluency across all three areas. They often are seen as “owners” within their organization, and this, to us, is what full-stack product management looks like.

Which area do you feel strongest in today, and which might be your growth opportunity?