I think most people have an incomplete understanding of what a product manager should do. It's bigger than "project management" or "project management + defining a roadmap + talking to customers."
What you are building, why, how you price it, how you speak to the market about it, how you position yourself in your category, how you partner with others to provide a better solution (either services companies to provide a turn-key solution or other software companies), how should you should allocate your engineering resources to best increase revenue, etc. And these questions touch almost every department in the company, so they have to be great communicators.
Just a few areas I routinely see bad PM's skip:
- Sales / Partner Enablement (awesome, you built something, but it doesn't matter if the field does't understand it or can explain it and its value)
- Market research / segmentation (are you building the right stuff for what you are targeting?)
- Creating new products / SKUs for opportunities within your existing target market/segments (growth)
- Identifying new/adjacent categories to develop products for (growth)
- Balancing building for today's customers vs building to get new customers
- Pricing/packaging (I'm not talking about physical product packaging)
- Build / buy / partner analysis
The Pragmatic Management Framework is a nice framework really shows the breadth of what a PM should be doing:
I would argue that everything you described above falls under the umbrella of business development and should be in the hands of a VP level exec and their staff.
Unfortunately very often I've seen this role handed out to a person who does not have either the qualifications or experience for this role, despite perhaps being adept at the clerical parts of the job (the meetings, the JIRA management, the Power Points, the Agile theatre).
My sense is that product managers are a layer of management which frequently causes disconnects and friction between the executive team, engineering, and ultimately customers. They typically have no power to influence business strategy and frequently no expertise on the complexities of engineering the product. (As always there are exceptions - but few and far between).
I'll even point to a perfect example playing out with Creative Assembly, the studio behind the Total War game franchise. Here's a nice dissection of the situation (complete with insider company leaks) by Bellular News:
The TLDR is that an excessive focus on a product management driven strategy is hurting the long term viability of a multi-million dollar franchise with a very commited but increasingly dissapointed fan base. Also some good points on the dangers of letting technical debt accumulate and how not to intereact with your customers. There's an MBA case study unfolding here I think.
What you are building, why, how you price it, how you speak to the market about it, how you position yourself in your category, how you partner with others to provide a better solution (either services companies to provide a turn-key solution or other software companies), how should you should allocate your engineering resources to best increase revenue, etc. And these questions touch almost every department in the company, so they have to be great communicators.
Just a few areas I routinely see bad PM's skip:
- Sales / Partner Enablement (awesome, you built something, but it doesn't matter if the field does't understand it or can explain it and its value)
- Market research / segmentation (are you building the right stuff for what you are targeting?)
- Creating new products / SKUs for opportunities within your existing target market/segments (growth)
- Identifying new/adjacent categories to develop products for (growth)
- Balancing building for today's customers vs building to get new customers
- Pricing/packaging (I'm not talking about physical product packaging)
- Build / buy / partner analysis
The Pragmatic Management Framework is a nice framework really shows the breadth of what a PM should be doing:
https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/product/framework/