This article was originally published on Delovoy Mir.
Technology is advancing at a breathtaking pace — there’s even a concept called «technological singularity,» which suggests that in some hypothetical future, an explosive surge in technological growth will fundamentally transform our civilization.
But it’s worth remembering: technology doesn’t enter our lives on its own. It comes through IT products built to solve specific problems or address the needs of a particular audience.
And product managers play one of the central roles in this process. They identify real user pain points, design the best solutions, build new user habits, shape new markets, and articulate new ideas that will matter in the future.
The Product Manager's Role in a Company — and Their Toolkit
Product management is a multifaceted profession that sits at the intersection of business, technology, and research. A PM works on a product from every angle: analyzing the market and competitors, researching the target audience and their needs, testing hypotheses, shaping a product vision, and managing both technical and creative teams to execute the strategy. Beyond that, a product manager is the CEO of their product — meaning their decisions directly determine its financial success.
The process of building a new product can broadly be divided into two stages: «problem exploration and solution discovery,» followed by «development and delivery.» In modern terminology, these are known as «Discovery» and «Delivery» — a framework rooted in design thinking and the Double Diamond model. Unlike most other members of a product team, the PM is actively involved in both stages.
A strong product manager has an extensive toolkit of techniques they draw on every day. For example, when launching a new product or a major feature during the Discovery phase, they might assess the potential market size using the TAM/SAM/SOM model (TAM — Total Addressable Market; SAM — Serviceable Addressable Market; SOM — Serviceable Obtainable Market), and analyze competitors’ strengths and weaknesses through SWOT analysis or a Competition Map.
At every stage of the product lifecycle, the PM researches current and potential audiences — their characteristics, goals, and needs. The most common qualitative research tools include in-depth interviews, surveys, feedback analysis, and UX research. The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework has also become popular for uncovering the deeper motivations and needs driving user behavior.
A product manager also needs to be fluent in quantitative research: web analytics and A/B testing in particular. The importance of these skills grows alongside the product’s active user base, since larger audiences make it possible to mathematically measure the impact of changes on product and business metrics.
More often than not, PMs tackle research and analytical work not alone, but together with a team of specialists — designers, UX researchers, and product analysts. That said, this varies depending on company size and organizational structure.
Beyond research, the product manager plays an active role in product development: managing the backlog and prioritization (using frameworks like RICE or ICE), writing requirements (e.g., User Stories, Definition of Done), and helping with process organization, team motivation, and hiring.
That’s why soft skills are just as important. The PM is the critical communication link between research teams, engineering teams, and the business.
Product Value — What It Is and How to Define It
Product value is, first and foremost, defined by whether the product solves a user problem better than anything else. If it does, most new users will stick around and become regular active users — and the product will grow. In product management, this state of having found genuine value for users is called achieving Product-Market Fit.
This is the foundational mission of a product manager: finding and achieving Product-Market Fit for a specific user segment. To get there, the PM and their team have to go through a demanding process: study the market, understand users and their problems, validate multiple value proposition hypotheses, build an MVP (or MLP — Minimum Lovable Product), study user reactions, and repeat the cycle several times over.
The product also needs to deliver value to the business — Business Value. But true value is only realized when you have both Product-Market Fit and a favorable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): ideally, the cost of acquiring a new user should be several times lower than the revenue that user generates.
Balancing Creativity with Objectivity
The word «creativity» might bring to mind eccentric artists. But let’s think about it more broadly. Creativity is the ability to step outside conventional rules and find new ways to solve pressing problems. In that sense, it’s one of the most important skills a product manager can have.
A great PM knows how to identify the root of a user’s problem, find an optimal and effective solution, and execute it. Experience, exposure to many different products and approaches, and creative thinking all make this possible.
A creative approach to problem-solving can help you come up with a hypothesis and test it quickly, build an MVP, optimize a business process, or discover a new user acquisition channel. Innovation and creativity are welcome at every stage of product development. So there’s no need to worry about AI replacing the profession anytime soon — it won’t.
Another hallmark of a great product manager is the ability to measure the results of product decisions in numbers. That’s what brings objectivity to the work: if business and product metrics are growing, the manager is making the right calls.
How Product Managers Create New Meaning
The 21st century is the age of information technology — a universal medium for building new technological products. We’ve grown accustomed to lives connected to the internet, to distributed work, and to remote collaboration. We’ve learned to experience the world through screens. The digitized way we live today is largely a consequence of technology advancing into every corner of our daily routines.
In this way, technology — or more precisely, technological products — creates new habits, new social behaviors, new values, and new meaning. And product managers are directly part of this process, as the authors and creators of those products.
Information technology isn’t the only vehicle for creating new values and meaning through products. Another important factor is the team building the product. Most of the digital services we use every day are created by cross-cultural groups — which means they inevitably carry multicultural values. And product managers often play a key role in hiring and shaping those teams.
To sum up: a product manager is a versatile professional who manages technical and creative teams within a company while actively engaging with external audiences. Drawing on their own breadth of experience and the value generated by their teams, they formulate a product vision and a strategy for its development. That’s why it matters to keep developing both hard and soft skills, to stay curious and well-read, to hone creative problem-solving — and above all, to listen carefully to your users and be their advocate.