WHAT DOES A PRODUCT MANAGER DO?
Published: Dec 08, 2025 - The Product Manager drives product vision, strategy, and execution to ensure solutions meet market needs and deliver strong business value. This role coordinates cross-functional teams to define requirements, optimize user experience, and guide products through the full lifecycle. The manager also analyzes data, customer insights, and industry trends to make informed decisions that maximize product performance.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Product Manager
1. Product Manager Duties
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Legal, Policy, Safety Operations and other internal teams to support and build a roadmap for internal platforms and tools.
- Process Optimization: Identify gaps, inefficiencies, or inconsistencies across the safety ecosystem and, in response, develop and test strategies and programs to support effective content moderation, ensuring processes and workflows are optimized for efficiency.
- Innovation Culture: Support the development of an innovative culture focused on prevention and experimentation.
- Hypothesis Testing: Identify product or process weaknesses, develop hypotheses to test, and use those results to inform best practices.
- Root Cause: Initiate, coordinate and provide root cause and corrective action exercises.
- Process Improvement: Identify, develop and implement process improvements to help teams scale.
- Technical Coordination: Work closely with technical and non-technical cross-functional teams to define technical requirements, scope, schedule and resourcing to drive a successful outcome.
- Stakeholder Management: Manage relationships with key stakeholders, build consensus, drive issues to closure, help identify risks and mitigations and communicate project status.
- Metrics Strategy: Work in tandem with the data science team to ensure that the metrics track is actionable and leads to a cogent and achievable strategy.
- Priority Management: Manage competing priorities in a fast-paced and constantly changing environment.
- Global Collaboration: Work with global teams across multiple regions and time zones.
2. Insurance Product Manager Details
- Product Development: Build and modify products to achieve maximum profitability.
- Portfolio Management: Maintain product portfolio to ensure its competitiveness and profitability.
- Portfolio Evaluation: Continuously evaluate the product portfolio, perform a post-mortem, and find an optimal balance of the product portfolio.
- Market Monitoring: Monitor the marketplace to ensure the product portfolio is well-balanced and competitive.
- Opportunity Identification: Identify and develop new opportunities for product development.
- Pricing Management: Manage product pricing, identify new pricing opportunities and work closely with finance, ensuring maximum profitability per product with sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis.
- Sales Collaboration: Tightly work with sales and marketing to deliver a seamless proposition for customers.
- Business Case: Produce the business case for the product initiative for approval and prioritisation to show how it will be positioned, how it is expected to perform, and its fit with business, client, and channel strategies.
- Project Planning: Produce or input to project and development plans, specifying goals, project phases, timescales and resource implications to obtain sign-off from key players.
- Project Management: Use structured project management to manage the development in detail, carry out regular reviews, identify and resolve problems to meet goals and milestones.
- Performance Tracking: Monitor, manage and report on the performance of products against P&L goals, client and customer expectations, driving recommendations for continual improvement.
- Knowledge Sharing: Share learning and provide advice and guidance on product areas.
- Contingency Planning: Maintain appropriate and up-to-date contingency plans to ensure continuity of operations as required by the business continuity planning framework.
3. Senior Product Manager Responsibilities
- Product Strategy: Combine multiple inputs to maintain the strategy, vision and roadmap for their product to support the business and ensure the success of the company and strategic goals.
- Backlog Management: Work with Dev, Product Owners and Business Analysts to keep the backlog filled, prioritized and deliver value to the customers and the business.
- Cross-Functional Enablement: Work cross-functionally to make sure that Sales, Training, Support, CS and others are aware of and equipped to sell and support the products and features they deliver.
- Cross-Functional Planning: Work cross-functionally to plan and coordinate with other teams to deliver the product in a shared services architecture.
- Development Efficiency: Maximize development efficiency and build a product that both fills demand and is operationally efficient.
- Global Coordination: Work with disparate teams both on and offshore and across multiple geographies to help keep the product moving.
4. Product Manager Job Summary
- Service Portfolio: Work within a team to define and develop the service portfolio and its overall market messaging and positioning.
- Business Planning: Develop and implement business plans, including revenue and profit objectives, promotions, advertising, bundling and other opportunity-based plans.
- Sales Support: Participate in monthly sales meetings and provide training and support as requested by direct regions.
- Platform Administration: Act as the point of contact and administrator for the service quoting platform.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-functional teams on products, issues and develop and implement solutions.
- Quoting Materials: Assist in the creation of service quoting material and other literature to assist the direct and indirect sales channels.
- Sales Training: Train direct and indirect sales teams in the process of selling service plans and products.
- Sales Enablement: Provide support wherever required in the sales of these products and develop all training material required.
- Marketing Strategy: Develop marketing, sales and pricing strategies for products.
- Product Support: Provide product support for product information and quoting.
5. Product Manager Accountabilities
- Sales Management: Responsibility for distributors’ sales performance, resource allocation and cost management of the product(s) is charged to achieve targets.
- Budget Control: Manage expenditure in place within the annual budget (A&P).
- Market Observation: Interact with all customer groups to make market observations and identify potential insights and market access issues.
- Market Research: Support and contribute to market research activities, using basic tools and sources.
- Forecast Planning: Identify suitable forecast analogues and help in setting up the strategy.
- Tactical Options: Identify potential key tactical options within each component of the marketing mix.
- Channel Optimization: Optimize channel and promotional mix for individual brands through appropriate resource allocation that meets brand objectives and customer needs.
- Marketing Principles: Understand and use marketing principles to deliver to customer needs.
- Brand Finance: Manage brand finance and budgets, including the appropriate management of brand resources.
- Operational Planning: Create and deliver operational plans appropriate to the life cycle of the brand to optimize return for Sandoz.
- KOL Development: Execute the key opinion leader development program.
- Promotional Materials: Lead development and delivery of key promotional campaign materials from insights to review, production and implementation.
- Strategy Execution: Drive consistent execution of product strategy throughout Marketing, Field Force, Managed Markets, Market Access and Medical, using appropriate KPIs.
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor business performance and external environment via appropriate tools and take corrective action to meet business objectives.
- Compliance Management: Ensure all promotional processes are in adherence to P3 guidelines.
6. Liabilities Product Manager Functions
- Product Vision: Define the liability products and services vision and requirements based on customer needs and business objectives.
- Cross-Sell Development: Engage and build cross-sell opportunities for new and existing products.
- Journey Design: Design the customer journey for new liability product features.
- Proposition Development: Constantly improve or build new propositions based on customer and competitive insights.
- Market Analysis: Conduct market analysis, feasibility studies and trend analysis to keep abreast of industry development and identify opportunities and submit new product proposals.
- Feature Expansion: Introduce new features and channels through existing or new partner ecosystems.
- Partnership Acquisition: Drive new customer acquisition through partnerships.
- Portfolio Analysis: Analyse portfolio performance and constantly improve the strategy.
- Strategy Management: Define and maintain product strategy, product revenue, market adoption and portfolio management penetration goals.
- Regulatory Compliance: Ensure products adhere to regulatory requirements.
7. Product Manager Job Description
- Product Ownership: Complete ownership of an entire ETH analytics line, ensuring and setting a plan for what needs to be done for the product to succeed.
- Product Strategy: Define the product strategy in collaboration with the leadership team and deliver on the overall strategic direction of the product in line with short and long-term business objectives.
- Lifecycle Facilitation: Facilitate the product development lifecycle for new products or features.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams of engineers, designers and other team members to translate product strategy and gaps.
- Market Fit: Identify and secure product-market fit and translate the roadmap into a plan of actionable deliverables.
- Customer Insights: Stay close to customers, lead the identification of target user segments and offer guidance on the strategic direction of the product based on market research insights.
- Team Mentoring: Future expansion and mentoring of new product team members.
- Performance Tracking: Track and analyze the performance of implemented changes and features.
- Competitive Analysis: Conduct market and competitive analyses to help form new strategies to further product and business objectives.
8. Product Manager Overview
- Budget Management: Oversee and manage operating departmental budgets and costs according to annual allocation to ensure efficient usage of resources.
- Marketing Strategy: Collaborate with the brand management team to develop marketing strategies and activities based on clients' business strategy and objectives to achieve the annual sales target.
- Forecast Planning: Prepare product forecasts and constantly monitor inventory levels to ensure optimal supply.
- Launch Management: Manage new product launches, including product launch plans, roll-out timings, sample preparations and display standards.
- Sales Analysis: Monitor and analyze sales trends and recommend marketing activities to achieve sales targets.
- Market Research: Manage market research to assess customer attitudes to the current product range and new product introduction.
- Product Training: Conduct product training to equip the sales team with the necessary technical expertise to sell the products.
- Client Relations: Establish and maintain ongoing relationships with clients.
- Product Support: Act as the first point of reference for all product-related inquiries and work collaboratively with colleagues to address any issues that may arise.
9. Product Manager Details and Accountabilities
- Business Insight: Quickly develop a deep understanding of business strategy, the market it operates in, and client and end-user needs.
- Competitive Tracking: Track the competitive landscape closely.
- Partner Analysis: Understand the partner landscape and the strengths and weaknesses of partners in target markets.
- Problem Prioritisation: Identify and prioritise the problems and needs that define the product roadmap, focusing on those with maximum impact and alignment with product strategy.
- Metric Development: Develop a set of commercially focused metrics for product features.
- Backlog Improvement: Collate great ideas generated across the business to manage a prioritised backlog of quick-win “always improving” features that will continually delight clients and end-users.
- Dependency Management: Work closely with other product teams to identify cross-team dependencies early and make sure everyone agrees on what they have to do and when to realise that value.
- Vision Delivery: Continually provide vision and direction to the team and stakeholders.
- Backlog Management: Ensure that the team always has a more-than-adequate, well-defined, prioritised and clearly articulated backlog of work.
- Release Planning: Lead the planning of product releases and set expectations for the delivery of new functionality.
- Impediment Mitigation: Provide an active role in mitigating impediments impacting the successful team completion of release and sprint goals.
10. Product Manager Tasks
- Commercial Prospecting: Provide commercial prospecting and anticipate technological developments.
- Budget Oversight: Oversee individual technology project budgets within the scope of responsibility.
- Technical Problem-Solving: Seek solutions to issues using deep knowledge in one or more fields and wide knowledge across multiple specialties.
- Customer Support: Identify and provide technical support to strategic customers with priority in the countries and regions.
- Issue Management: Independently handle complex issues with minimal supervision.
- Issue Escalation: Escalate only the most complex issues to the appropriate staff.
11. Product Manager Roles
- Vision Alignment: Act as the link between business operations and the respective development teams, ensuring all parties align with the Product Vision.
- Vendor Coordination: Liaise with Fraud Vendors, coordinate and build new integrations and enhance current integrations.
- Roadmap Execution: Collaborate with Stakeholders and Product Owners to create and execute the strategic roadmap.
- Roadmap Ownership: Own and build the Fraud product roadmap with user insight, analytical research and competitor analysis.
- Resource Estimation: Estimate feature resource allocation and opportunity costs through collaboration with the solutions architects and development teams.
- Feature Evaluation: Evaluate feature viability alongside the Stakeholders according to budget, risks and dependencies to allocate resources in the Fraud product roadmap.
- Cross-Product Alignment: Regularly update and communicate with the product team to align and prioritize cross-product deliverables with the roadmap.
- Requirements Development: Develop product requirements with the product owner and ensure the priorities are in line with product goals.
12. Product Manager Additional Details
- Needs Prioritisation: Analyse and prioritise market and customer needs to develop present and future product lines.
- Financial Modelling: Develop and manage financial and commercial modelling, including investment plans and associated ROI.
- Solution Strategy: Drive strategy and solution development within the Cloud product group.
- Release Management: Ensure all release-ready deliverables are completed in adherence with committed timeframes.
- Sales Enablement: Support post-launch sales enablement efforts and ongoing proactive product management, including sundown and retirement.
- Market Collection: Collect solar inverters and energy storage systems marketing information in the market, such as major distributors, suppliers, products, types and market shares.
- Market Analysis: Provide market analysis to the product director regularly.
- Product Communication: Communicate with headquarters to get the latest product information, work with local sales teams and provide professional product knowledge.
- Requirement Collection: Collect customers' requirements for new product development reference.
13. Product Manager Essential Functions
- Product Ideation: Lead the ideation, discovery and delivery processes.
- Solution Development: Develop solutions to problems by collaborating across the organisation, product areas and functions.
- User Research: Perform user research and conduct experiments to identify pain points and customer needs.
- Prototyping Skills: Create mock-ups and pursue prototypes to gather feedback from customers in collaboration with the UX and Tech Lead.
- Data Decisions: Drive data-informed decisions using data insights together with qualitative and quantitative customer insights.
14. Product Manager Role Purpose
- Automation Products: Own products that enable the automation of fulfillment operations and through those products, influence and support the fulfillment automation strategy.
- Product Roadmap: Evolve and drive the product vision, strategy and long-term roadmap and execute it well by constantly managing stakeholders’ expectations and working through dependencies across multiple products and teams.
- Product Performance: Be accountable for the performance and adoption of the product and work towards achieving the Outcomes and Key Results.
- User Understanding: Understand key user personas for the product and their pain points.
- Feature Demonstration: Understand and demonstrate the features of the product to different audiences within and outside of the immediate team.
- Experimentation Skills: Drive experiments against a defined hypothesis which enables robust data-driven decisions on product improvements and influences product objectives.
- MVP Discovery: Understand product discovery and establish a minimum viable product for any new product or feature, collaborating with user experience and engineering teams to prototype and validate the MVP.
- Team Leadership: Provide leadership and direction to cross-functional teams on short-term tasks and near-term priorities.
- Idea Adoption: Drive the acceptance and adoption of ideas and improvements with product teams and engineering stakeholders.
- Requirement Definition: Effectively outline and explain new product needs to the engineering team using user stories with personas and acceptance tests and help the team break down complex work into smaller, deliverable chunks of value.
- Sprint Planning: Steer sprint and release planning sessions by working with engineering counterparts to plan sprints and releases that deliver maximum business value with the least effort.
15. Product Manager General Responsibilities
- System Integration: Help to build a tight integration of product, internal systems and third-party applications.
- Roadmap Delivery: Deliver iteratively on the roadmap and own the process from requirements to tracking and analysing impact.
- API Approach: Approach all requirements as API first, collaborating with design and cross-functional stakeholders to arrive at a decisive plan of action.
- Customer Alignment: Stay aligned with customer feedback and own improvements.
- Architecture Design: Build suitable abstractions to ease planned future development.
- Stakeholder Communication: Effectively manage communication with cross-functional stakeholders.
- Documentation Ownership: Own documentation and training collaterals for enabling internal and customer-facing teams.
16. Product Manager Key Accountabilities
- Strategy Alignment: Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to align on Paxful Marketplace strategy and priorities to deliver measurable results.
- Roadmap Ownership: Develop, own and constantly improve the strategy and roadmap for Paxful Marketplace products and effectively implement it with a team of product managers.
- Team Leadership: Set goals, manage and supervise the team of product managers and product analysts.
- Team Mentoring: Evaluate and mentor them constantly to ensure efficient operation and the continued success of organizational goals.
- User Coverage: Ensure that Marketplace considers the full range of Paxful experiences for all user segments and personas, across individuals, businesses and vendors.
- Experience Improvement: Increase value and improve the Marketplace experience for users.
17. Senior Product Manager Roles and Details
- Product Development: Responsible for driving product development for a supporting product focus area spanning more than one full engineering team.
- Vision Strategy: Collaborate on building a business case, defining product vision and strategy.
- Customer Insight: Internalize customer pain points, communicating regularly with Customer Success, Sales and Marketing about customer feedback.
- Project Communication: Communicate the status of the project with stakeholders.
- Backlog Management: Manage the prioritized feature backlog and bug process.
- Product Specification: Create clear and concise product specs, test, iterate and drive to launch, partnering with engineers and designers on product development.
- Consensus Building: Drive consensus and identify key metrics for upcoming projects.
- Market Research: Study market trends and competitive offerings, research, monitor and analyze industry and competitive trends regularly.
- Status Reporting: Provide updates and recommendations to the supervisor.
- Feature Analysis: Lead analyses of the competitive environment, customers and product metrics to determine the right set of features to drive engagement and usage of assigned applications and products.
18. Enterprise Product Manager Responsibilities and Key Tasks
- Continuous Discovery: Lead and engage others in continuous discovery activities to evolve the digital product strategy to meet changing business needs or to leverage new technologies that will enhance the digital product and deliver better business outcomes.
- Team Collaboration: Identify and partner closely with software engineers, data engineers, designers and other members of the digital product team to direct the development of the digital product, considering the dependencies of multiple digital products in the ecosystem.
- Roadmap Decisions: Make decisions regarding the digital product roadmap and priority of items on the digital product backlog, leveraging a deep understanding of the business and technical dependencies while balancing investments from multiple business units.
- Release Ownership: Responsible for the content and quality of the digital product releases, collaborating with product teams to establish a launch plan to ensure usage and adoption while balancing the needs of different user groups across multiple business units globally.
- Stakeholder Management: Manage stakeholder expectations by effectively communicating the product vision, strategy and roadmap to business partners and key business stakeholders.
- Documentation Support: Ensure appropriate documentation is created to launch and support the digital product.
- User Monitoring: Monitor user feedback and metrics to create solutions and drive better user experience and business value.
- Team Development: Identify product management team improvements, mentor more junior product managers and drive agile best practices to improve delivery.
- Strategic Execution: Drive strategy and execution for multiple products, multiple workflows and multiple platforms across multiple business units.
19. Senior Product Manager Duties and Roles
- Roadmap Management: Manage a product roadmap for a set of features from inception through implementation.
- Requirement Collection: Collect requirements, establish key performance metrics, craft the user experience and drive execution.
- Data Analysis: Collaborate closely with data science to dive deep into data to understand users.
- Business Shaping: Work with business leaders to help shape and drive business cases for product features.
- Feature Ideation: Ideate and wireframe new features that will be in the hands of millions of users across the globe.
- Technical Communication: Understand and explain complex technical issues, discern impact and communicate them to maximize clarity and drive resolution.
- Trade-Off Decisions: Use good judgment to make appropriate trade-offs when scoping and specifying solutions, ensuring that anything built adds value to the business and continues to delight users.
20. Product Manager Roles and Responsibilities
- Positioning Development: Collaborate proactively with product development, brand marketing and digital to develop product positioning and crystal-clear messaging that resonates with target industrial end-users for the accessory brands.
- Marketing Planning: Design and influence alongside the Sr. Product Marketing Manager on the development of product marketing plans and product or category portfolios in conjunction with the Brand, Digital, Global SBUs and eCommerce teams.
- Launch Leadership: Lead the new innovation launch plans and steer the cross-functional implementation of the plan, including transitions, forecasting, certifications, manufacturing timelines and launch execution.
- Category Management: Own the category management function for the multi-brand SBU, including Dewalt, Irwin, Lennox and Stanley branded accessories.
- Sales Enablement: Accelerate and support the assembly and delivery of customer presentations, training and online messaging with a focus on industrial two-step channels.
- Channel Collaboration: Collaborate and influence country teams to support sales channels, with a high focus on industrial and eCommerce.
- Solution Training: Train and create excitement around end-user driven solutions and the problems they solve for consumers and end-users.
- Marketing Tools: Develop the necessary marketing tools to enable channel teams to successfully close the sale.