What do you do? Product managers explain their job to family members

So, I tossed in what I thought was a throwaway line in a recent post. In Getting on the Same Page, I wrote about the nebulous meaning of the word “product,” especially at content companies. I included this parenthetical remark:

(try explaining to your mom what it means to be a “product manager.”)

Well, lots of people glommed onto that aside and demanded to know exactly how do I explain what I do to my family.

Good question!

In fact, it’s such a good question, that I put it to other PM’s. Below are responses from me, as well as from colleagues at The New York Times and elsewhere. It’s not even remotely comprehensive and, given the many hats that product managers wear, only scratches the surface of the many ways this question is answered. Consider it a conversation starter.

So, product managers: how do you describe what you do? Please add your thoughts.

Happy Customers
by Dan Olsen, Product / UX Consultant

I tell my family that my job is to work with everyone in my company to make sure that customers like the web and mobile products that we build for them.

Sitting at the Crossroads
by Dan Blumberg (me), Product at The New York Times

I sit at the crossroads of The New York Times’s newsroom, design, technology and senior management. As a product manager, I work with these teams to identify and deliver products that delight our readers and provide value to our company.

(And if they ask for more, I tell them this)
I identify product opportunities by talking to our readers and to my colleagues. Then, I work with editors, designers and developers to build prototypes, from which we find out whether the product will really deliver the value we thought it would. If so, we keep at it. If not, we take what we’ve learned and try another idea. At all times, my goal is to define a clear product vision that the newsroom, design, technology and my colleagues from other departments can rally around. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to be a great listener, be practical and to constantly look at the product — and the choices we need to make — through the eyes of our readers.

Sitting on a Slightly Unbalanced Stool
adapted from writing by Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Product at Samsung

Note: my description of product management is heavily influenced by Ty Ahmad-Taylor. Here are two great visuals he created that show the product manager’s job and the product discovery process; they’re borrowed from “How to choose and hire product people.” For content companies, I might add a fourth leg to the “unbalanced stool” that Ty describes, namely for content creators, a.k.a. journalists. (More on that in Tony Brancato’s answer below).

“The Car Parent”
by Ellen Chisa, MBA Student (formerly product manager at Kickstarter)

This isn’t one I came up with — but my family describes it as “the car parent!”

Independently they were frustrated at small inconsistencies in a car (why are buttons here, why does this shade of blue not match that one, etc). They felt like there should be one person responsible for making sure that all the decisions on the car worked together.

And eventually I was explaining an actual project I did at work (Office on Mobile) — and some of the challenges I faced. At the end of my explanation they all said “OH WE FINALLY GET YOUR JOB — THE CAR PARENT.”

They understand it as — the person who makes sure that regardless of the process, the thing that comes out the other side is good.

The Force that Binds
by Tony Brancato, Product at The New York Times

I gave up on explaining my job to my family a long time ago, beyond just saying “I run the website.”

Alternately, after a few glasses of wine, (and this is particular to being a product manager at a traditional media company), I say this:

For a million years, we lived in a two-dimensional world. There was the editorial/newsroom dimension (folks that wrote the words/took the pictures/designed the pages) and the business dimension (the folks that sold the advertising adjacent to the words & pictures/sold subscriptions and distributed the printed product). This was a clean and simple world and everybody understood all the relationships and boundaries. It was flatland.

The internet introduced a third-dimension: technology. Technology created a countless number of variables into the relationship between the newsroom and the business, like
- interactivity
- navigation
- personalization, targeting, and access tiers
- presentation and functionality variation based on screen resolution/browser/device capabilities
- alternate forms of distribution (search, social, email)
- the concept that you could evolve/iterate on the thing after it was “published”
etc. etc.

All hell broke loose when the third dimension was created. We left flatland.

Product Management is the force that binds the first two dimensions to the third and strives to create a coherent thing that is the best expression of all these dimensions, in the service of users/readers. Product management is central to the question of whether the internet is a straight conduit for traditional journalism, or whether the digital expression of the journalism can be something other, and I think that’s where it gets uncomfortable — where you get into the push and pull of what the “product” is and how product can play a role in the journalism. We’ve had relatively little time to establish the relationships and boundaries here versus the pre-internet era.

My family stops paying attention about halfway through this diatribe and then I fall back to “Look, I just run the website.”

Going to Extremes
by Kate Harris, Product at The New York Times

Hyperbole is my method of product demystification.

I work on the mobile apps at the NYT as a product manager, this means I sit in the middle of a team of very passionate people all with very distinct priorities.

My marketer says: we need more subscribers — when the app loads, let’s make sure the first thing we communicate to the user is to subscribe, put it in caps!

My advertiser says: we need to increase advertising revenue — we need the ad to work harder — we need more ads, everywhere.

My designer says: we need more white space — get rid of all the advertising and subscription marketing.

My developer says: we have no time to work on ads, marketing units or new designs — it’s critical we stop all new development and rewrite what we already have or the app will crash.

My tester says: after i read 17 articles, go from landscape to portrait 4 times, it doesn’t work on red 4.3” Samsung phones 7 out of 10 times.

My users say: ur app sux — i NEED nite mode now, and whaat U want me to pay?

My editor says: this needs to look and feel like the NYTimes no matter if you’re on a phone, a tablet or the web — figure out how translate our story-telling methods to mobile. Also the Breaking News timestamps are not Timesian — they need to be red and ALL CAPS.

My app partners say: this needs to feel like [Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows, etc…] — use our font treatment and visual language, and did we mention we have a new platform launching next week, can you whip something up quickly?

My job is to listen to and empathize with everyone. They are all right (and much more reasonable than their hyperbolic alter egos). We need to build an app that is visually appealing, intuitive, stable, fast, feature-rich and “Timesian.” Together, we need to create an experience that our readers love and that is valuable to our company.

And, if that doesn’t do the job, I just have my family watch this:

And you…?
So, product managers: when your family asks you “what exactly do you do?,” what do you say?

Thanks to the product managers in the Greylock Partners community for their contributions and encouragement.

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