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What Is Product Management? (And What It’s Really Like)

 I still remember the first time someone asked me if I had ever considered a role in product management. At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what a product manager (PM) even did. Was it marketing? Was it engineering? Was it project management? Or was it something else altogether?


So… What Exactly Is Product Management?

At its core, product management is the practice of building the right product for the right people.

That might sound simple, but in reality, it involves juggling many hats: understanding customer needs, setting a vision, collaborating with design and engineering teams, prioritizing features, analyzing data, and ensuring that what’s being built aligns with both business goals and user expectations.

I often explain it this way:
If building a product were like making a movie, the product manager is the director. They don’t do the acting (engineering), camera work (design), or music (marketing), but they’re responsible for making sure all of it comes together into one great film.

The PM Balancing Act: Users, Business, and Tech

A PM has to balance three core pillars:

  1. User Needs – What do our customers actually want? What are their pain points?

  2. Business Goals – What helps the company grow? What features drive revenue, retention, or market share?

  3. Technical Feasibility – Can this actually be built? Will it scale?

Getting these three to align is like solving a puzzle—one that keeps changing every few days.

There are times I’ve sat in back-to-back meetings, hearing the marketing team say, “We need this feature for our next campaign,” while engineers tell me, “That will take six weeks, not two,” and users ask, “Why don’t you just bring back the old version?”

That’s when the real skill of a PM kicks in—not just managing the backlog or writing feature specs, but navigating people, priorities, and trade-offs.

It’s Not About Doing Everything—It’s About Asking the Right Questions

One thing that surprised me early on was that PMs don’t do the actual coding or designing. Instead, they work with those who do—and their job is to ask the right questions:

  • “Why are we building this?”

  • “Who are we building it for?”

  • “What does success look like?”

  • “What happens if we don’t build it?”

Great PMs are insanely curious. They dig into user research, conduct interviews, analyze data, and constantly refine their understanding of the market.

I once watched a PM kill a feature a week before launch—not because it wasn’t built well, but because the user feedback during testing made it clear the feature would confuse more people than it would help. That’s product management: making tough calls for the sake of the product’s success.

What a Typical Day Looks Like (Spoiler: There Isn’t One)

There’s no “typical” day in product management. Some days you’re writing detailed product requirement documents. Others, you’re in back-to-back meetings aligning with engineering, design, sales, and support teams. And then there are days when you’re deep in spreadsheets, looking at user metrics and adoption rates.

But the most fulfilling moments, for me, come when a feature I helped define goes live—and I see real people using it, benefitting from it, talking about it.

It’s like seeing your vision take form in the real world. It never gets old.

Is Product Management Right for You?

If you love solving problems, working with cross-functional teams, and thinking both strategically and empathetically, product management might just be your dream role.

But fair warning: it’s not glamorous. You won’t always get credit. You’ll often be the one responsible when things go wrong, even if you didn’t directly cause them. You’ll deal with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and pressure from multiple directions.

But if you thrive in uncertainty, enjoy being the glue that holds a product together, and genuinely care about users—then you’ll find product management incredibly rewarding.

To me, product management isn’t just a role—it’s a mindset. It’s about falling in love with problems, not just solutions. It’s about asking, listening, iterating, and always staying curious.

I won’t say it’s easy. But it’s definitely worth it.

So the next time you hear the term “product manager,” just remember—it’s not someone who builds the product. It’s the person who makes sure we build the right product.

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