Obviously, everyone knows what a product is. It can be anything from a keyboard to a car, to the cloth we’re using, to a spaceship. The web browser you have on your computer is a product.

All of these things are products by the classic definition. Therefore, we can hypothesize that a product manager should manage the product department from the title, product manager. However, it is not the case that a product manager is responsible for an entire device or software.

A product or a feature or a piece

At many startups and large companies, product managers are in charge of sections of what we, ordinary consumers, typically consider a product. Let me share an example here. When you use Facebook, you’re actually using a multitude of different features. Wall, message, groups, each one of them is a product. And for each one, it might have a dedicated product team working on it. Each of these products has a PM with a couple of designers and engineers called product teams or feature teams.

A product manager leads a team that works on the ranking algorithm. A product manager leads a team that works on ads. And many other product managers are working on different things that have to do with this news feed. But there are also cases where resources do not divide product managers into more extensive applications, or products like Facebook, or pieces of software, but rather by the platform.

For example, there may be a product manager responsible for everything in a company’s Android application, another accountable for everything in IOS, and another responsible for the website. A few companies even split the software based on the user journey, so you’ll find PM for acquisition, retention. There are also product managers who work with advertising and subscription services, depending on your business model.

So, a Product is…

Let’s not complicated and go more in-depth on the different types of product manager and product structure. The vital part of this post is: a product can be anything from a complete real-life product as the consumer sees it, or in some cases, divided into smaller sections for larger companies, more complex products.

I’ll talk about the different types of product managers soon. I see you there.