I’ve been asked this question a few times lately (in nicer ways), so I thought I’d answer it for everyone.

I’ve also asked this question to a couple of product managers to see what they thought their job was.

I think a lot of people don’t understand what a product manager is or what one is supposed to do.

So let me tell you.

First of all, why is this important?

I’ll tell you why.

Startups are started by founders.

Those founders often play the role of a ‘product manager’ at the beginning.

So without this role, startups don’t start. We must be grateful for when a good product manager is in place with good engineers/designers, as magical things happen.

Okay – here’s the story:

Let’s take a trip down the history lane and explore when the first ‘product manager’ evolved.

Back in the day, everyone used to build their own house.

Get some mud, tree logs, and start building.

One day, someone had this great idea:

Hmm.. Listen, I built my own house, and made many mistakes while doing so, which I learned from. Why not let me build your house for you for a small fee?

This guy built a 2nd house, and a 3rd, and a 4th, and so on…

He became a ‘builder’.

Some time has passed, and then he realized that he had a problem. While his houses were structurally good, people hated how they looked. So he convinced a ‘designer’ to help him.

Now the builder and the designer were collectively crafting beautiful houses that were well-built. Brilliant.

Only they still had a problem: nobody wanted them 🤔

They had no idea what the market wanted…

Maybe people wanted more bedrooms. Maybe they wanted a swimming pool. Maybe they wanted houses in a certain area. Finding out wasn’t their specialty.

So they brought on a ‘business person’.

They told him:

Ok, go on now. We can design and build the best houses, but we don’t know what people want… Find out, and let us know.

This ‘business person’ probably had a few ways of finding out:

1. Talking to people who want to buy a house
2. Envisioning what those people want (especially if you’re part of the ‘target audience’)
3. Going through ‘data’ of such people to extract insights

In reality, it just doesn’t matter how you find out ‘what the market wants’. What really matters is that you do!

If you don’t, you’d suck at your job.

If you do, you’d probably be doing amazingly well.

Ok, let’s zoom out:

1. Builder = Engineer
2. Designer = UI/UX Designer
3. Business Person = Product Manager

In order to be a good product manager, you must:

1. Be GREAT at finding out what the market wants
2. Be good at understanding how things are built
   • you don’t need to be a builder/engineer, you don’t need to code, but you need to know enough in order to communicate/negotiate with builders (and be respected by them)
3. Have a good sense of design
   • you don’t need to be an artist, you don’t need to design, but you need to be able to tell good design from shit design, and you need to be able to sketch your ideas or interpretations of what the market wants
4. Be a good communicator
   • you’ll need to communicate with the customer, engineer, designer (and potentially supplier, stakeholder, accountant, etc…). If you suck at communication, you can’t do your role

So you need to be good at 3 things, and GREAT at 1.

The first is a non-negotiable.

Here’s the thing:

If you’re building houses, there’s an infinite number of different houses you could build.

Within that infinite number, there’s a house that a million people want. There’s also a house that a thousand people want. And there’s a house that nobody wants.

If you’re gonna go through the effort of building that house, wouldn’t you want to build the house that everyone wants?

The difference could be as drastic as what you build becoming a billion dollar industry, or something that gets thrown away.

Obviously, you should optimize for building what brings you the greatest rewards (which is what people want the most).

This is why it’s so important.

How to be great at finding out what the market wants?

That may be a topic for another blog post… It’s both an art and a science.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.