What is your answer to, "What Is Product Management?"

As a Product Manager your primary job is to create a product that offers both customer value and business results. This means operating at the intersection of customer needs (think user experience and solving customer problems), business needs (think revenue and profit), and technology (think technical viability and scalability). As a PM you'll manage the product throughout its lifecycle, from market development to market decline.

In a nutshell: the product management function is tasked with clarifying and communicating what product investments that will help a company reach its goals, and working across teams to deliver these results.

There are a lot of activities that a product manager does, but it will ultimately go back to that premise, at different levels of detail:

1. Product Vision: articulate what the product can achieve in the long term for users, and how that will in turn achieve the company's goals.

2. Product Roadmap: break down the vision into the appropriate sequence of investments (new features, improvements, etc.) that will move the product towards that vision. Account for current competitive landscape, company priorities, and more.

3. Feature specs / PRDs / Epics: take a specific initiative and clarify what specific things need to be delivered as part of it to make progress towards the roadmap / vision goals.

4. Iteration plan: take the initiative or feature spec and break it down further, clarifying and communicating the sequence of smallest changes/steps that should be shipped to drive user value and build towards the vision.

To do the above well, you need to talk to customers and have great customers insights, collaborate with UX and engineering, align with cross-functional partners, understand business priorities, communicate a vision and goals clearly, handle conflicts and resolve misalignments around priorities, etc. This is where all the various skills that are required to be a good product manager come in.

But, in the end, your job is to clarify and communicate product investments and work to deliver the product changes that will make a company successful.