Product Managers in Startups: What’s their Role?

Startup PM here. Article is pretty accurate. My responsibilities:

1. Act as scrum product owner: define features, fill backlogs etc. A little additional project management/release planning when needed. Keep scope creep under control.

2. Market research: talk to customers, investigate competitors, build pricing models, financial projections, etc.

3. Code a little when needed. Make prototypes and mockups. Analyze raw data from the production system and make statistical models. Test and validate when needed.

4. Strategic sales & marketing. Go after the big fish directly when sales gets over their head and the CEO is booked. Position the product and help sales figure out how to sell it.

5. Absolutely anything else that's going to further our strategic goals. Get the pizza. Find contractors for non-core development areas. Paint the walls of the office.

Shorter answer: whatever it takes.

If your startup is all tech people and at least one of you can't do the PM role, you're boned. If you're the archetypical one-tech one-biz startup, and the biz person's full-time role doesn't knock out all the PM objectives, you're boned. If you have to hire a third person to be the PM, you're doing something wrong. In most cases, if the person doing the PM role for you tells you he can't do anything else because the PM role takes too much time, you're probably getting rolled. Unless he's spending all his time traveling to customers.

The job of the PM (and my partner Dave will laugh at me for saying this) is to get prospects on the phone and find out what they want from the product. For straight-to-consumer products, finding the right people to get on the phone is part of the challenge of the job.

Before you launch something, surely everyone in a startup is the product manager, to one degree or another?

Even if said product is the startup itself, and the customers are angels/VCs/...

Related question:

How do you get a job as a Product Manager in a startup? Every job I find for startups/small companies is for a "ninja programmer", "code guru", "awesome programmer", etc.

Having worked as a startup "product guy" for the last five years, I think there are some good answers to the original question.

Several notes:

1) If you fall into the trap of thinking that engineers, technologists, CEO's, and others can handle this role, you'll just be part of hundreds or startups that don't have their act together. I've sat down with way too many startups who both don't have a handle on the marketplace or customer needs and have poor processes in terms of planning / prioritizing release cycles and roadmaps. While others in the company should have a grasp of both of these elements, the key point is correctly identifying the first part (i.e., customer needs) and then mapping it to the second (i.e., the roadmap).

2) The person who fills this role should be fairly well-rounded and be sort of a weird breed in that they actually are comfortable (and good at) talking with people (customers) and yet can get down into technical details. I wouldn't go as far to say that coding is necessary but surely mocking up initial wireframes and UX should be considered as part of the job.

3) Related to terminology, I'd try to stay away from using labels like "project manager" or "program manager." These are way too broad and make it seem like the role is more focused on logistics and coordination. Above all, this role is strategic...keeping the trains running on time is just one aspect and arguably, not the most important.

"Translate vision into execution." what?

Here's what I see a Product Managers Role to be.

1. Define the Product Features. Take input from all relevant stakeholders (Customers and execs) and translate this into a set of product features. Document and distribute. Clarify any concerns between stakeholders.

2. Clearly define features. An extension of point 1. Work with design and technical teams to make sure that the features are clearly defined for everyone working on the product.

3. Clearly Communicate Features. Document the heck out of the product features. PRDs, IA, UI Designs all need to be clearly documented. Then COMMUNICATE these features back to all stakeholders. If someone doesn't understand a feature its the PM's role to make sure they do.

4. Prioritize features. Even if you're not working in an agile approach at some point you will need to draw a line between MUST HAVE and NICE TO HAVE features.

5. Product Advocate. A PM is the champion for a product. It's important they believe in the necessity of what they are building and are willing and able to champion it internally and externally.