Product Management's core responsibility is to drive the business growth of a product by delivering profitable customer value. Technical skills and building are means to an end, not the end itself. This business focus remains constant even as tools like AI change.
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Former BetterRx CEO Ben Clark sees product management as a direct revenue generator. A product manager's core value is finding significant, monetizable customer pain. When they succeed in creating strong product-market fit, it makes the jobs of sales and marketing easier and directly fuels company growth.
Business viability is often siloed to executives or sales, but the product manager and their team ultimately pay the price for failure. PMs must own this risk, tracking metrics like the LTV/CAC ratio to ensure the product is not just loved by users but is also sustainable.
To be truly successful, a product leader cannot just focus on features and users. They must operate as the head of their product's business, with a deep understanding of P&Ls, revenue drivers, and capital allocation. Without this business acumen, they risk fundamentally undercutting their product's potential impact and success.
The core job of a Product Manager is not writing specs or talking to press; it's a leadership role. Success means getting a product to market that wins. This requires influencing engineering, marketing, and sales without any formal authority, making it the ultimate training ground for real leadership.
It's not enough to improve engagement or NPS. A product manager's job is to understand and articulate how that metric connects to a financial outcome for the business. Whether it's growth, margin, or profitability, you must explain to leadership why your product goals matter to the bottom line.
A technical AI background isn't required to be a PM in the AI space. The critical need is for leaders who can translate powerful AI models into tangible, human-centric value for end users. Your expertise in customer behavior and problem-solving is often more valuable than model-building skills.
PMs often feel pressure to keep engineers busy building new features. The real job is to drive deep understanding, even if it means perfecting three core features rather than adding a fourth. It's better to pause building than to create a bloated, mediocre product that does nothing well.
To advance in product management, move beyond only solving customer problems. Frame your work in the language of business impact. Articulating how features will affect corporate goals and key metrics is essential for gaining buy-in from senior leadership and progressing your career.
As AI automates synthesis and creation, the product manager's core value shifts from managing the development process to deeply contextualizing all available information (market, customer, strategy) to define the *right* product direction.
A common founder mistake is hiring a first product manager to simply prioritize and ship a backlog of ideas. Instead, PMs create the most value when given ownership of a key metric and the autonomy to drive user and business outcomes.