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Question: Given This Scenario, What Does The Product Manager Do?

Published: October 30, 2017

Update: Great comments so far. Check them out.

I need your help.

Please review the scenario below and answer the single question (below the scenario). You can reply using a comment here in Medium, or reply to this tweet. Please resist the urge to critique or troll other answers. By narrowing the scope here, I am hoping to learn more about how people view the Product Manager role.

Scenario

You have a team with the following:

Note: Order is alphabetical. Apologies in advance for all role name infractions and confusion.

  • Agile Coach and Facilitator
  • Data Scientist / Experiment Designer
  • Interaction Designer (UX)
  • Service Designer
  • Software Developer
  • UX Copywriter / Content Strategist
  • UX Researcher (Qualitative and Quantitative)
  • Visual Designer Operating Assumptions

Note: If you need to make additional assumptions to provide an answer, please do so in your reply.

  • Product is B2B SaaS. Product is in market but capabilities are expanding rapidly.
  • Team has unrestricted access to customers and/or users
  • Team has unrestricted access to customer support and/or success
  • Team has unrestricted access to product marketing
  • Team has access to customer/user feedback channels
  • You can have more than one person for each role
  • All team members are dedicated and not shared between teams
  • Team is dedicated, and not shared between value streams/products
  • All team members are highly experienced (and experienced in current domain/context)
  • The team has high trust, high safety, and high autonomy
  • The team has experience with various decision making, continuous improvement, experimentation, and prioritization frameworks.
  • Team values and enjoys being tasked with business outcomes, and has a track record generating those outcomes

Question

Given this scenario, what is the role of the Product Manager?