What is a PdM?

Broadly, a Product Manager owns the prioritization, delivery, and management of a product or set of products within an organization. They determine the what and when for product delivery while functioning as a liaison between the team, the business, and the customers. However, the responsibilities and tasks associated with Product Managers can differ between organizations as well as teams within an organization.

Roivant IT PM Core Responsibilities

  • Identify customer values and needs through research using UCD/UX design techniques
  • Determine product strategy based on customer needs, user feedback, and business objectives
  • Understand and articulate what users aim to achieve
  • Identify and prioritize features and requirements for the product
  • Rally the product team around agreed-upon outcomes and a vision for the product
  • Are the DRI for the health, delivery, and launch of the products
  • Help anyone in the product team get “unstuck” – That is, if they are blocked by external or internal obstacles or forces, the PdM should work towards freeing the team of those obstacles to get them moving forward again.
  • Updating product documentation

Roivant IT PM Core Tasks

  • Market research/discovery to find opportunities and/or validate assumptions
  • Prioritize and mitigate riskiest assumptions around existing product pains/needs/wants
  • Data synthesis and analysis to determine areas of focus and effort
  • Develop the strategy around a product, determining the priorities of features and requirements for the given product along the delivery roadmap
  • Consult with the product team to validate priorities and possibilities
  • Write user stories detailing the desired outcome of work necessary for product development
  • Communicate the product vision and subsequent work efforts to the product team and key stakeholders
  • Negotiate product and project requirements with stakeholders
  • Facilitate meetings and workshops intended to drive towards clearly defined goals and outputs

Design (UCD, UX)

  • Design in Roivant IT is handled by PMs, not designers, though ultimately everyone should play a role in design thinking. Designers typically represent the users of the product.

  • Specific design tasks handled by IT PMs:

    • User interviews and research – understanding how users/customers work, what pain points they feel, what their wants/desires for a given product are
    • Determine what features and are created to solve specific problems
    • Design workshops
    • Persona creation
    • Process design / Service design techniques

Difference Between PdM, PrM, PjM, PdO

  • PjM (Project Manager) is responsible for the execution of specific projects– often short, time-constrained efforts around a specific outcome. They gather the needs of the project, assign tasks, manage budgets, and maintain momentum of the team’s execution along a given timeline.
  • PrM (Program Manager) is responsible for overseeing a program—a series of related projects. They will help coordinate efforts between the individual projects and may oversee a team of project managers. This role may have more stakeholder management and focus on operational improvements.
  • PdO (Product Owner) is a role within a more traditional Agile Scrum team. They assume a similar role of a product manager, though specifically around communicating product vision, maintaining a product backlog, and representing stakeholder interests to the scrum team.

What does a PdM not do?

  • Traditionally, the PM role can be or do whatever the organization needs.
  • Ideally the PdM will not assume the tasks of the engineers. That is to say they should not be working on development or implementation tasks.
  • While the Product Manager may overlap in responsibility with that of a typical Project Manager, in an ideal state, the PdM will not be functioning as a “task master” and demanding status updates on any given work.
  • A PdM does not dictate what work is done or how to do it. The PdM should gain alignment on efforts and listen to and respect the product team on feasibility and possibilities.

Rituals, Workshops, and Meetings (Oh my!)

  • Discovery and Framing - FIXME: DEFINE
  • Scoping - FIXME: DEFINE
  • IPMs – FIXME: DEFINE
  • Retrospectives – FIXME: DEFINE
  • Kickoff - FIXME: DEFINE

How do we define a balanced team?

  • In lean digital product development, a balanced team is a team management philosophy that has people with a variety of skills and perspectives that support each other towards a shared goal, valuing multi-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery focused on customer value as a source for innovation.
  • Typically, this is represented as team members from Product, Design, and Engineering disciplines, with Product representing the business, Design representing the users, and Engineering representing the technology.
  • In Roivant IT, this could be used in a couple ways:
    • Representation from the core teams within IT (Product, Infrastructure, Support, Security)
    • Skill sets needed for a given effort (scripting or coding, design-thinking, research, communication, specific SaaS expertise)