Product manager

A product manager makes sure that their products provide value and achieve the right outcomes by balancing user and business needs.

Product managers work with multidisciplinary teams, bringing together the views of their team members and user and business needs, to frame and understand the problem the team is trying to solve. They work with teams to provide the right outcomes for users and the organisation, making decisions on priorities and ensuring teams comply with appropriate standards.

Throughout this course, we have only mentioned government services, so you may be a little confused as to why we are now talking about ‘products’! Services are often made up of multiple products, each of which is designed and built by a different product team. Some senior product managers can oversee multiple product teams.

There is also a role in government known as a service owner. This is a role that is similar to a senior product manager and is responsible for the end-to-end management of a service.

As a user researcher, you will work closely with product managers. Let’s explore the role in more detail.

What do product managers do?

Product managers set the direction and focus of the team. They define the ‘vision’ for the product or service – what it aims to achieve for users.

Product managers help teams to understand what to build, when to build it, and why. They are responsible for balancing user needs with policy, technology and business or organisational goals. They manage the team’s roadmap and the backlog, which is a list of tasks organised in order of importance and urgency.

They decide what the team should focus on at each stage of the design life cycle, incorporating user research data, performance and analytic data, and stakeholder feedback. Stakeholders are everyone who has an interest in the product or service being built, including policy teams, senior managers or executives, and the design team itself.

Working with a product manager as a user researcher

Product managers need to understand users and their needs to help inform the direction of a product’s design or functionality, so your research is essential for helping them to make decisions about how to direct the team.

Product managers need clear and relevant insights from user research. While the whole team should get involved with user research, it is essential for the product manager to observe sessions, attend research playback sessions or show and tells, and assist with analysis. Doing so will mean they have a comprehensive understanding of their users and you will be able to work together to ensure that their needs are met.

As a researcher, you also need to ensure that research is built into the team’s plan. Research is sometimes overlooked or not given enough time or resources. When this happens, you need to advocate for yourself and ensure that you have enough time to conduct thorough research that can generate useful insights for the team.

The product manager is the person organising the backlog and determining what gets worked on during sprints, so they should ensure that you have time to research and analyse properly.

You should also not wait to be invited or asked to contribute – you are an integral part of the team and research needs to be shared and discussed by the whole team. Share your research early and often. Keeping things to yourself can create problems further on in the process – not explaining why something matters, it may be ignored could lead it to be ignored.

Research lands best with teams when tied to their goals. This helps everyone understand how the things they’re working on directly benefit the end users.

Researchers and product managers plan together, share knowledge often, and trust each other’s expertise. Your research shapes the roadmap and the design of the product or service and product managers use your findings and insights to focus and prioritise the team’s work. You both ensure that your users are heard in every phase of the work.

Product managers lead the team toward a shared goal. Your research helps them stay on track and avoid wasted time. When you work closely together, users benefit and services improve.

If you would like to know more about product management and the product manager role, Government Campus UK has a course here on FutureLearn – Product Management in Government: Getting Started.