The job description varies by product and company; products at different stages of development and growth within the same company demand different things of their PMs.

Fundamentally, the PM's the one who gets the product shipped, whatever that entails. If the product is shipped, the PM makes it a success, including shipping followup features or products.

I've heard a few general descriptions, from "does anything except write code" (not true in many circumstances) to "mini-CEO" (implies greater degree of authority than often present). The best one that's stuck is "captain of a pirate ship"; you have to figure out where the ship is going, influencing without authority.

On a general level, rough job scope can be in the "design and plan" categories through to execution, driving everything forward, getting approvals and making sure all the edge cases are covered (both in the product and overall, e.g. legal approvals, trademark searches, etc) - plus measuring success, and making sure those metrics are defined and measurable in the first place. Listening to customers, or organizing user studies before launch, and incorporating feedback at every turn.

You sit in the middle of the product vision, and while engineers might want to make decisions that seem like good ideas from a technical standpoint, you are the guardian of the context which makes them into great ideas (or not).

Similarly, feeding back technical issues and restrictions into the UX design process, and providing those intuitive leaps when you realise if the design goes like this, and the technical architecture like that, the whole thing can be done in a tenth of the time to 99% of the effectiveness.

I haven't done that particular job title but I have been a Product Planning Manager (at Sony for TVs).

My impression is that it is a very hard role to describe because it includes "whatever needs doing" and will vary by product and the team around you. It will include making sure everything gets done and tied together including not just the product itself but the documentation and any licensing agreements and ensuring correct marketing information is prepared for the product at the right time (and the marketing team understand the product). It may include what is normally considered business development and associated liason with legal. It may include booking and preparing for a trade show.

In a big company playing a linking role and getting the right people talking can be important even if you then step back.

Very importantly it should be someone able and prepared to take decisions that might not be big and require senior management but that need making and aren't really either engineering decisions or design decisions.

Like anything, it's just a title. However, how I view it is as someone that is responsible for a "product." A product can be a module, function or full fledged widget, but the product manager is responsible for the item itself. They don't necessarily worry about sales and exactly 'how' things get done. But they have a responsibility for it so they better have an idea of what's going on.

I consider myself a PM and this is what I do:

Srum Lead

Sprint Planning / Release Management

"Tier 3" Support

Documentation Editor

Question Answerer Guy (Why does this piece of software do this and why is this link not blue?)

I'm also the liaison between management and the engineering staff.

There is some more official type stuff on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_manager

As pageld said, it's just a title. At an established startup, the product manager is generally the one translating the founders vision into a product. The founder might have an idea or see a need, but the product manager is the one who researches the market, does the competitive analysis and determines the feature set. Then they get it built and launched.

They may not do all the work, but they're the ones covering all the little details: making sure an email goes out when a new user signs up, reviewing that copy, watching retention, etc.

You'll see a lot of job descriptions for product managers reference 'Mini-CEO', which is pretty apt.

Think of a product like a mini-company in and of itself. A product manager is simply the CEO of said mini-company.

-write specs -analyze data (more consumer) -own the product roadmap/set priorities for the team (more senior PMs) -project manage -coordinate between different functions/stakeholders, ie eng and design or sales, bi, etc. (more enterprise)