[jdlshore]

Product management isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a people management position. It’s a cross between inbound marketing, product design, and high-level prioritization/planning.

Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.

[starky]

Reading this thread had me questioning my own understanding of what a Product Manager is. Engineering has little day-to-day involvement with the product managers as they are busy working with customers, setting roadmaps, and determining requirements for products. Interactions are typically to demo what we have built, get feedback on a new feature or deviation from the product requirements, or in a weekly status update meeting.

A lot of people here are describing a position I would just call project management with a bit of technical management thrown in.