Roles & Responsibilities
Understanding the distinct yet complementary roles in product development
Product Manager
Primary responsibility: Ensure the product is valuable and viable.
Customer & Business
- Identify real user problems worth solving
- Validate demand through research and testing
- Ensure alignment with company goals and strategy
- Define success metrics that matter to the business
Discovery
- Work with design and tech early to explore solutions
- Test assumptions and reduce risk before writing specs
- Conduct user interviews and analyze feedback
- Prioritize features based on value and effort
Framing the Problem
- Clearly articulate the problem in plain language
- Define goals, constraints, and success metrics
- Avoid prescribing specific solutions
- Create a shared understanding across the team
Outcomes Over Outputs
- Focus on how features improve customer experience
- Measure impact on business metrics, not just feature completion
- Be willing to pivot when solutions don't achieve outcomes
- Communicate the "why" behind product decisions
PRD (If Needed)
- Keep it lightweight: problem, objective, assumptions, success metrics
- Avoid solution-prescriptiveness
- Focus on the "what" and "why," not the "how"
- Update based on technical and design feedback
Key Takeaway: Complementary Strengths
The most successful product teams leverage the complementary strengths of PMs and Tech Leads. PMs bring customer insight and business context, while Tech Leads bring technical expertise and implementation knowledge.
When these roles collaborate effectively from the beginning, they create products that are both valuable to users and technically sound.