A Product Manager?

A lot of people struggle to understand what really is the role of a product manage and sometimes even product managers have varying interpretations of their job. As my long work day today was winding down, I was also thinking of what am I actually doing.

Susan Mernit sums up the role very nicely in his post "from poetry to software": I like to say it's like being the executive chef in a big restaurant because as big piece of my job is deciding what to send out when, and another is to review and roll up all the possibilities and then recommend what we actually build and empower the teams that build it.

I like this description because product management at the end of the day is not a science or mathematical job, it is an art of human communications, visualizing the product and it's users with their needs, and seeing the business field and trying to wield all this together into a nicely fitting package. The work is like walking through a story where you have multiple other actors and the plot keeps changing daily, but you still see the vision of where the path is leading.