Part 0 · 2 chapters · ~12 min
What Product Managers Actually Do
The four product risks (value, usability, feasibility, viability), the product trio of product, design and engineering, product versus project management, the shapes of PM roles (platform, growth, core, technical), and why staff engineers do product work.
1
Four risks and a trio
A product team is usually a trio: a product manager, a designer and a tech lead, deciding together with engineers what to build. Good trios discover together, so the people who will build the solution also see the problem.
WHAT A PRODUCT MANAGER ACTUALLY DOES
four risks a PM is accountable for (Marty Cagan's framing)
swipe the figure sideways, or tap expand for full screen
1/5
value risk
The biggest risk in most products is building something nobody wants. The PM owns the evidence that the problem is real and the solution is wanted.
will they want it?the PM owns this risk
2
Kinds of PM, and the engineer's overlap
| PM role | focus | overlap with staff engineering |
|---|---|---|
| core / feature PM | user-facing journeys, conversion, satisfaction | scoping, trade-offs, launch quality |
| growth PM | acquisition, activation, retention experiments | instrumentation, experiment infrastructure |
| platform / technical PM | internal platforms, APIs, developer experience | almost total: the users are engineers |
| risk / compliance PM | KYC, fraud, regulatory features | money flows, audit, state machines |
A staff engineer who can state the user problem, the metric it moves and the cheapest way to test it is doing product work, and is far more effective in planning than one who only estimates tickets.