WHAT DOES AN IT PRODUCT MANAGER DO?
Reviewed under Editorial Standards by Lam Nguyen

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.
Editorial Process

Lamwork content is developed through structured review of publicly available job postings and documented hiring trends.

Editorial operations are managed by Thanh Huyen, Managing Editor, with research direction and final oversight by Lam Nguyen, Founder & Editorial Lead. Content is periodically reviewed to reflect observable labor market changes.