Define Roles & Responsibilities

What are the primary artifacts and activities for each role in your organization?

What one organization calls product management, another calls product marketing. For smaller companies, a product manager is often responsible for both product marketing and sales engineering. In larger companies, we start seeing specialized roles centered around business strategy, product release planning, and go-to-market/sales enablement.

In general, product management focuses on problems to be solved for the market full of customers: defining and delivering the right products by empowering teams with clarity on problems-problems to be solved in the product or its promotion.

Development and engineering teams are responsible for solutions. And so is Marketing. Product marketing professionals identify problems in the go-to-market aspects of products and rely on Marketing to solve them.

Delivery is the focus of product operations (if you have this role) as well as sales teams (including sales engineering) and customer support.

Obviously, defining and delivering products is a team sport. Ideally the team works as one. Good ideas come from everyone. However, as in any team, each player has a specialty or knowledge area that is their primary focus. Designers design; developers develop; sales people sell. And product managers and marketers identify personas and their problems at each step of its lifecycle.

Originally published at http://www.under10consulting.com on December 19, 2019.