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Background
As we already discovered, product managers have a lot on their shoulders and wear many hats. They manage projects, create products, talk to customers, and manage the results. Product Managers are being called the “Product’s CEO”, but in my opinion it’s wrong to call them CEOs. Usually I call myself a doctor or an inventor because I usually invent new solutions or improve existing ones to fix problems people have.
Job descriptions may vary between product managers, but most of the time, we are the ones responsible for:
- Defining product vision and strategy
- Understanding customer and market needs
- Analyzing competitors and their products
- Evaluating ideas and incorporating product feedback
- Prioritizing features to create value for customers and deliver on business goals
Defining product vision and strategy.
Product vision is the main purpose of your product and the future direction. Sometimes product vision and company vision are the same.
Product strategy is what you want to achieve and how you want to get there. It defines the “why” behind the product you’re building.
But, product managers are not building the strategy and vision in isolation. Usually marketing, sales, operation, IT, and product work together to produce both the company strategy and tie the marketing strategy into it.
While working senior level product jobs, I would always be a part of a work group refining the company vision and strategy, making sure we are aligned and the product I’m hired to build reflects the strategy.
Understanding customer and market needs
This is a double-edged sword of product management: you’re responsible for understanding the customer, but on the other side you’re catering to a market.
As product managers, we are expected to listen to each and every customer, analyze their wants and deliver solutions to cover the demand, but there is no way for you to listen to every voice in the product, it will drive you mad. That’s why products work in tandem with customer support and marketing.
Customer Support
By talking directly to the customers and collecting their requirements in written form, customer support is the eyes and ears of every good product manager. By collaborating on structured ways to get the feedback, product managers would know what to focus the team on.
Marketing
Marketing is usually the group responsible for the market analysis, market estimation, SWOT analysis, and brand positioning. They will provide the market we need to target with out products. But, it’s important to remember that your product is working for “personas” or an aggregated customer. Personas have different attributes, and although their demographics might be the same, they have different problems to solve.
Analyzing competitors and their products
The first instinct is often to pull up tools like Sensor Tower, App Annie, or SimilarWeb. These platforms are useful because they provide quick access to downloads, revenue estimates, traffic sources, and other data points. But competitive analysis is more than just looking at numbers — it’s about understanding why customers choose your competitors and how your product can stand out.
There are countless ways to approach competitor research, but most can be structured around a few core frameworks:
- SWOT analysis helps map out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Feature comparison matrix is helpful when you need to visualize gaps between your product and others in the market.
- Jobs-to-be-Done perspective, you start seeing competitors not just as feature lists but as solutions to specific customer problems.
That said, it’s easy to get lost in data. A good product manager knows when to stop. Instead of tracking every single feature release, focus on what really influences your product strategy: differentiation, positioning, and market opportunities. Remember, customers don’t use your product because it looks like everyone else’s – they use it because it solves their problem in a way that fits their needs better than the alternatives.
Evaluating ideas and incorporating product feedback
One of the most challenging parts of product management is prioritization. Ideas come from everywhere – leadership, engineers, customer support, marketing, and of course, customers. The role of a product manager isn’t to say yes to every idea, but to evaluate them and connect them back to business goals.
A good starting point is user research. Deep interviews, surveys, and usability testing give you insights into how customers actually experience the product. Talking directly to users often reveals pain points that can’t be seen in analytics dashboards. At the same time, customer support is a valuable partner — they’re the first to hear recurring complaints or feature requests, and they can help you spot patterns.
Design also plays a critical role. UX research provides perspective on how usable and intuitive a product feels. Sometimes the best “new idea” isn’t a flashy feature, but a small design tweak that removes friction and improves the overall experience.
Not every idea should be built, even if it’s valid. Products need to filter input through frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or Kano (basic vs. performance vs. delight features) to separate “nice to have” from “must have.” Incorporating feedback is about balance – honoring customer voices without losing sight of strategy and feasibility.
In the end, evaluating ideas is less about finding the loudest request and more about uncovering the most impactful change for both the customer and the business.
Prioritizing features to create value for customers and deliver on business goals
Every product manager faces the same challenge: how do you decide which features to build first? Prioritization is about balancing two forces – customer value and business outcomes – while acknowledging that time and team capacity are limited.
The first step is to anchor decisions in the product’s vision and strategy. If a feature doesn’t move the product closer to its purpose or support a key strategic goal, it’s usually a distraction. Beyond that, frameworks can bring structure to prioritization.
Popular frameworks:
- RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) helps evaluate features with measurable criteria.
- MoSCoW categorizes them into Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, and Won’t-have.
- Kano analysis focuses on customer delight versus basic expectations.
These tools don’t make the decision for you, but they provide a common language for discussion with stakeholders. As mentioned before, products are not working in isolation. Usually products pick a framework and align on the way priorities are going to be assigned.
It’s also important to keep both short-term and long-term value in mind. Some features solve urgent customer pain points and reduce churn, while others may not show immediate results but lay the groundwork for growth, scalability, or competitive advantage. A healthy roadmap usually balances both.
Finally, prioritization is not a one-time exercise. Market conditions change, customer needs evolve, and new opportunities appear. A strong product manager revisits priorities regularly, proactively communicates with stakeholders, and isn’t afraid to say no when something doesn’t align with strategy.
In the end, prioritizing features isn’t about building the most things — it’s about building the right things, at the right time, to maximize impact for both customers and the business.
Bottom line
The role of a product manager is not about managing people, but about managing outcomes. A product manager is an inventor that connects the dots between customer needs, business objectives, and the development team to ensure the product creates real value. The true measure of a product manager is not the number of features shipped, but whether those features drive meaningful impact for both the customer and the business.
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