Gayle Laakmann

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A PM’s role in defining product strategy differs between companies. At some companies, the strategy is “bottom up,” where key decisions often come from developers and PMs. At other companies, the strategy is more “top down,” where the direction is generally decided by executives and PMs, and developers are left to implement it.

Microsoft originated the PM role in the 1980s when they realized that they needed someone between the marketing and engineering teams who focused on making the product usable for customers.

Uche from Microsoft says, “We wants people with inquisitive minds. People who look at things from multiple perspectives. As a PM, you’ll wear many hats, so how you think is more important than any particular technical skill.”

On many teams, the PM starts by writing a one-page “spec”—a high-level description of the goals and use cases.

Product managers do customer research and look at market trends to identify strategic areas for the next release.

A typical day for an EPM in Cupertino involves a lot of communication: presenting the team’s progress, learning about the status of other teams, and reviewing the current status with executives. Throughout these discussions, the EPM is responsible for surfacing issues and finding ways to resolve them.

Product managers own the vision and roadmap for their team. Amazon values customer obsession, and many new ideas will come from figuring out what customers want and need. This can be from talking to customers directly or by looking at data that’s available via SQL. Amazon is very data driven, so PMs need to have strong analytical skills.

PMs are involved in concepts and roadmapping as well as finding bugs, prioritizing features, executing on current projects, and thinking about the future. The PM serves as the interface between the feature area and the rest of the company.

Think about a movie. As a producer you work with your creative team and the actors and camera and light to hold it all together. At the end of the day, along with the director, you’re responsible for the movie.