What Product Management Does (and why it matters for your business)

Walk into any executive team meeting and ask "What should we expect from Product Management?" You'll get blank stares, nervous laughter, or a dozen different answers. Ask ten product managers what their job actually is, and you'll get eleven opinions.

This isn't because product people are confused or executives aren't paying attention. It's because Product Management is genuinely difficult to define. Unlike finance, marketing, or engineering—functions with clear boundaries and recognised qualifications—Product Management sits awkwardly between disciplines, changes shape depending on context, and means different things to different organisations.

Trying to define Product Management is the wrong approach—you'll just get academic answers that don't help anyone do the work. Role definition and org chart placement don’t matter as much as the jobs that need to be done, and the ways that good product management can change your business outcomes.

Why Product Management Is So Hard To Pin Down

Product Management defies easy categorisation, and there are solid reasons why.

There's no standard qualification. You can't study Product Management at university like you can accounting or engineering. Most product managers stumbled into the role from somewhere else—specialist, customer experience, marketing, economics, or straight from founding their own companies. Each flavour brings different strengths and weak spots.

The role changes dramatically with context. A product manager at a seed-stage startup looks nothing like one at a ASX 100 enterprise. In the startup, they might spend their day poring over insights for customer conversations and exploring novel solution options. In enterprise, their days are full with partner collaborations on topics ranging compliance, risk, strategy, and delivery. Same job title, completely different realities.

Even the word 'product' means different things. In financial services, it means credit cards, home loans, or investment products with P&L responsibility. In digital companies, a product is software that users interact with to accomplish tasks, solve problems, or derive value. For consumer brands, products are tangible items with supply chains and retail distribution. Three entirely different disciplines wearing the same badge.

The function sits between everything else. Product Management lives at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. That's valuable, but it also means product managers spend most of their time translating between groups who speak different languages who are optimised for different outcomes.

The fact that product management defies categorisation isn't a problem to be solved—it's the nature of the discipline. Problem solving and value creation look different depending on the industry, company stage, and operating model. What doesn’t change are the critical jobs that need to be done.

Jobs for Managing Digital Products

Forget the role definitions and career frameworks. These jobs need doing regardless of who actually does them—I've seen designers, marketers, engineers, and accountants effectively performing these roles, while plenty of organisations with large product teams aren't doing them at all!

Here are the critical jobs that Product Management performs in organisations that do it well.

Drive Convergence

Bad strategy or poor execution are not the problem. Most failures are a result of doing the wrong work, and that's leadership responsibility. Marketing optimises for lead generation, sales chases revenue targets, engineering focuses on technical debt, and design pursues user experience perfection. All perfectly reasonable objectives, but often moving in different directions. The first job is focussing the sum parts in one coherent direction targeted on the right outcomes.

Driving convergence doesn't require owning or controlling everything, nor is it about facilitating consensus. Key to driving convergence is the ability to see from many perspectives, make meaning, and communicate with clarity.

This means being the person who can explain why this initiative matters more than that one, how short-term trade-offs serve longer-term objectives, and what success looks like beyond individual team metrics. It's about creating shared understanding—and direction—from groups who naturally see the world through different lenses.

When done well, teams stop competing with each other and start reinforcing each other's efforts. When it's done poorly, you get the classic dysfunction of brilliant people working incredibly hard on things that don’t deliver results.

Catalyse Action

Strategy without action is just expensive PowerPoint, but action without clear intent is just motion mistaken for progress.

We need to close this gap, start the doing, and guide tactical delivery that is coherent with strategic intent.

That isn’t achieved by simply coordinating efforts to deliver against plans and hit deadlines—that’s delivery management. It’s more than that. It requires managing the friction that prevents ideas from becoming real value. Sometimes that’s as simple as just getting started, and finding the fastest path to customer feedback. The best teams know that data and feedback is what evolves strategy, and getting that right matters much more than where you start.

The best product managers are impatient with process and obsessed with outcomes. They are willing to have difficult conversations about what’s possible within existing constraints, and ask uncomfortable questions like "What are we not doing because we're doing this instead?", because they know that focus enables more of the right work to happen..

Balance Value

Every function in your company is fighting for a different flavour of value. Sales wants revenue, marketing wants reach, technology wants durable architecture, design wants the best experience for customers, and finance wants efficiency. They're all valid aspirations, but someone needs to balance these competing interests. Further, ‘once and done’ discussion during strategy development is never enough—it’s a continuous balancing act that is changing all the time.

Product Management doesn't own all the value decisions, but they're often best positioned to join the dots between different types of value and broker trade-offs that best serve broader business objectives.

This means understanding what sales needs to hit their targets, why engineering is pushing back on that timeline, what customers are actually struggling with, and how all of these constraints fit together into decisions about where to invest next. It's synthesis work that requires both commercial awareness, customer understanding, and technical literacy.

Limit Risk

Building products is inherently risky. You're betting time, money, and opportunity cost on assumptions about what customers need, what technology can deliver, and what the market will reward. Product Management's job is making those bets more intelligent.

It is impossible to eliminate risk in any business worth doing. Yet it's easier than you think to learn the right things, quickly, in ways that inform decisions.

Good product managers are obsessed with testing assumptions, gathering feedback, and course-correcting before small problems become large disasters.

Marty Cagan’s 4 Big Risks are helpful here. Sometimes this looks like rapid prototyping and customer research. Sometimes it's about feasibility with a Tech Spike or Proof of Concept. Sometimes it's a Customer Pilot or other ways validate market demand. The specific techniques matter less than the underlying discipline of treating product development as a series of experiments rather than a predictable manufacturing process. David Bland’s approaches to Testing Business Ideas are a lamp to guide your way.

Making it Work as a Product Leader

If you're a product leader struggling to articulate your value or position your function within the organisation, here's how to think about it:

Stop Fighting For Ownership

The fastest way to marginalise yourself is obsessing over who owns what. Product roadmaps, customer research, competitive analysis, go-to-market strategy—these are collaborative activities that require input from multiple areas. Claiming exclusive ownership as “Mini CEO” or CEO of the Product creates territorial battles you can't win and don't need to fight.

Focus instead on being the person who connects the dots between different perspectives. Sales understands customer urgency, engineering knows technical constraints, marketing grasps positioning challenges, and finance tracks commercial viability.

Your job isn't owning these insights—it's synthesising them into coherent action.

When you position yourself as an orchestrator or partner rather than the decision-maker, other functions become collaborators rather than competitors for influence. This is how you build the cross-functional relationships that enable product success.

Listen First, Then Lead

Every organisation has its own culture, political dynamics, and unspoken rules about how work gets done. Before you can drive convergence or catalyse action, you need to understand the system you're operating within.

What motivates the sales team? How does engineering prefer to work? What does leadership actually care about beyond the official company objectives? Who has informal influence, and how do decisions really get made? This isn't corporate anthropology—it's practical intelligence that can be the difference between product initiatives that succeed or fail.

Make Strategy Tangible

Executive teams are generally good at articulating vision and strategic direction.

Where leaders often struggle is translating that vision into real decisions on what to do next week, next month, and next quarter.

This is where Product Management adds enormous value. Take high-level strategic priorities and turn them into specific initiatives with observable success metrics. Explain how short-term tactical decisions serve longer-term strategic objectives. Make the connection between company goals and the work in development obvious for everybody involved.

When strategy feels abstract or disconnected from daily work, teams default to their own priorities and assumptions. When strategy is clearly connected to specific product decisions, alignment becomes natural and sustainable.

Making it Work as a CEO

If you're trying to get better results from your Product Management capability, here's what actually matters:

Decide What Product Management Means In Your Company

This isn't about copying what works at other companies—it's about being intentional about what jobs you need Product Management to do in your specific context. Are you optimising for delivery execution or strategic discovery? Do you need to generate customer insight or coordinate partners to win? Are you building platform capabilities or shipping customer features?

There aren’t any right or wrong answers, but it informs who you hire and how you structure things. A delivery-focussed Product Manager has different skills than a strategy-focused one. A product person in B2B enterprise operates differently to one working on consumer products.

Hiring the wrong kind of person creates frustration for everyone involved.

Be explicit about your expectations, both internally and in your hiring process. "We need someone who can translate business requirements into technical specifications and coordinate delivery timelines" is a perfectly valid brief. So is "We need someone who can identify new market opportunities and validate them through rapid experimentation." But they're different mindsets, and best served by different people.

Create The Conditions For Success

Product Management effectiveness is largely determined by organisational factors beyond the control of individuals. Reporting structure, decision-making authority, access to customers, engineering capacity, budget allocation, timeline expectations—these systemic factors matter more than individual talent.

If you want your product teams to make customer-centric decisions, give them regular access to customers and data. If you want them to balance short-term and long-term value, make sure they understand the business model and commercial constraints. If you want them to move fast, don't surround them with approval processes that slow everything down.

If you want your product teams to make customer-centric decisions, give them regular access to customers and data.

The two biggest complaints executives have about Product Management are “it’s too slow” and “...if only our people were capable of executing the strategy”. However, these are usually systems problems, not people problems. People will optimise for the incentives and constraints you create, not the outcomes you say you want.

Align Your Operating Model With Your Expectations

If you've decided you want product-led growth and customer-centred innovation, your operating model needs to support that ambition. This usually doesn't require a full transformation, but it does require removing the barriers that prevent product teams from doing their best work.

Some of this is structural—where Product Management sits in the organisation, how budgeting works, what metrics get tracked and reported. But much of it is cultural—how decisions get made, what kind of risk-taking gets rewarded, how collaboration actually happens in contrast to how it's supposed to happen on the org chart.

Pay attention to what your product teams spend their time on. If they're mostly in meetings defending roadmap decisions or explaining why features are taking longer than expected, they're not spending time on customer research, market analysis, or strategic thinking.

The work team actually do tells you more about your operating model than any Ways of Working artefact.

Product Management isn't mysterious—it's four critical jobs that drive business results. Most organisations struggle not because they lack talent or ideas, but because they haven't created the conditions for convergence, action, value balance, and intelligent risk-taking to happen. Get those conditions right, and the results follow.