WHAT DOES AN IT PRODUCT MANAGER DO?

Updated: Dec 08, 2025 - The Information Technology (IT) Product Manager leads the entire product lifecycle by defining the vision, developing business cases, and ensuring strong product performance through data-driven insights. This role aligns strategies with senior leadership, fosters a collaborative and high-performing team culture, and translates product goals into actionable initiatives. The manager also focuses on continuous improvement, innovation, and efficient execution to achieve measurable impact and sustainable product success.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for IT Product Manager

1. IT Product Manager Duties

  • Project Management: Review and approve for ITSC all Business Impact Statements.
  • Scope Approval: Approve project scope and change requests.
  • Issue Mediation: Mediate with IT and business project issues and risks.
  • Release Planning: Partner with release management to develop and approve the release scope.
  • Product Strategy: Develop, define, maintain, and communicate the product strategy and roadmap.
  • Progress Reporting: Measure and communicate the progress of a project to the client and senior management.
  • Goal Prioritization: Prioritize goals and objectives developed in product strategy.
  • Competitive Analysis: Cultivate knowledge about competitor products to suggest changes that may help gain a competitive edge in technologies.
  • Success Measurement: Define and measure the success of changes made to the product.
  • Action Planning: Create appropriate action plans to address when success measures are not met.
  • User Adoption: Define and measure the user community's adoption of product enhancements.
  • Adoption Improvement: Create appropriate action plans to address when adoption success measures are not met.

2. IT Product Manager Details

  • Product Leadership: Promoting the product vision and empowering team members to ensure the product’s success.
  • Business Strategy: Building the business case for the product roadmap and reporting on product impact within the market.
  • Performance Management: Being responsible for product performance and measurable outcomes.
  • Industry Awareness: Keeping up to date with the latest methodologies, technologies, and industry trends relevant to the product domain.
  • Roadmap Alignment: Presenting and aligning the roadmap with the senior leadership team regularly.
  • Team Building: Creating a strong team environment and culture with high morale and productivity.
  • Feature Planning: Breaking down strategies and features into meaningful consumer stories.
  • Continuous Improvement: Continuously improving both product and process.
  • Execution Management: Driving execution, removing roadblocks, and making swift decisions when teams reach an impasse.
  • Innovation Research: Researching and identifying new opportunities to innovate for consumers.
  • Lifecycle Management: Managing the entire product lifecycle from planning to tactical execution.
  • Consumer Insights: Analyzing consumer research to develop key product insights.

3. IT Product Manager Responsibilities

  • Product Ownership: Responsible for one IT product or several IT assets such as IBM Maximo, Global Supplier Portal (GSP), EzMaxMobile (Maximo version 7.6.2).
  • Solution Development: Lead the iterative development of a solution, has a global vision of the project, which allows them to take charge of the roadmap, quickly identify issues and drive solutions.
  • Backlog Management: Provide backlog management, iteration planning, and the user stories.
  • Value Assessment: Assess value, develop cases, and prioritize stories, epics and themes to ensure work focuses on those with maximum value that are aligned with product strategy.
  • Product Delivery: Responsible for the delivery of the product(s)/solution(s).
  • Architecture Alignment: Contributes and aligns with Global Enterprise Architecture.
  • Cost Optimization: Contributes to optimizing the cost of the solution.
  • Digital Compliance: Secure digital compliance with industry standards and P&G Policies.
  • Operational Completion: Ensure operational completion through IT housekeeping, automated monitoring, improved sandbox/testing environments as well as running interfaces to relevant OT software and hardware.
  • DevOps Framework: Building and working within the DevOps framework.
  • Continuous Evolution: Drive with passion, continuous evolution of handled applications to optimize cost, capacity and performance.
  • Expertise Building: Build and sustain a center of expertise, share standard methodologies with local and broader teams.

4. IT Product Manager Job Summary

  • Roadmap Planning: Establishes roadmaps for the process automation products, in alignment with the capabilities and roadmaps of the IT products.
  • Strategy Development: Define and develop the business process automation strategy and vision and define long-term capabilities.
  • Go-to-Market Execution: Defining and executing the go-to-market strategy together with Markets IT Managers, Business Relationship Managers, corporate functions and end-to-end business processes leads.
  • Product Analytics: Defines and monitors the product analytics to improve the value for Nestlé and retires the relevant products based on trends and KPIs.
  • Product Governance: Establishes the governance for its own products and participates in the IS/IT governance to enable prioritization across multiple options.
  • Team Development: Develops a high-performing product team.
  • Customer Segmentation: Use the deep understanding of the business capabilities to segment the customers based on their needs and profiles.
  • Market Targeting: Provide an outside-in-based view of how to best target each segment.
  • Stakeholder Orchestration: Orchestrating internal and external multi-functional stakeholders to define, validate and refine product vision, strategy, definitions and roadmaps.
  • Strategic Communication: Prepare the strategy and communication material to create a shared understanding of the product, in particular, on how to market and sell it (for BRMs at the Center and in the markets).
  • Performance Delivery: Deliver and operate it (for product teams) and measure its success (for performance managers and BRMs).

5. IT Product Manager Accountabilities

  • Performance Analysis: Analyze the reporting provided by the performance manager for insights into product impact and adoption in the market.
  • Value Indicators: Work with customers to define and validate specific key value indicators (KVIs).
  • KPI Definition: Define with the team key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve the product value.
  • Competitive Analysis: Analyze the competitive landscape, specifically for TCO / value for money, to inform the product strategy before and during product life.
  • Governance Participation: Participate in the IS/IT governance processes that enable prioritization across multiple options and support the business governance processes (e.g., automation that would remove business headcounts or drastically impact business ways of working).
  • Risk Management: Understands the business risk appetite and delivers applications within that acceptable risk level.
  • Cultural Leadership: Create alignment, lead by example, promote an open culture and values in a sustainable way.
  • Talent Development: Coach, define effective development plans and assess talent, building the right capabilities for the team and for the organization's long-term success.
  • People Empowerment: Empower and enable people, give and receive feedback, evaluate and differentiate performance, constantly challenge the setup organization to ensure its results and effectiveness.