posted 15 years ago
Product management is the group responsible for planning out a product/product family. The group itself works closely with strategy, marketing, and engineering and in some companies may be found within one of those three departments or may have responsibility for one or more of those tasks.
Product managers are not "management" in the sense of managing other people. This is a common misunderstanding. The term "management" in "product management" refers to the management of a product (e.g. deciding what to build) as opposed to the management of people in a supervisory role. Unfortunately because of the common understanding of the term, many people see product management as managerial and therefore a higher position on a totem pole.
Product managers can go one to more senior product management roles, taken responsibility for more decisions and eventually owning not just part of a product or a product, but eventually whole families or categories of products. They also may take on supervisory roles along the way being responsible for more junior product managers. Very senior people can wind up in roles in the categories named above.
--Mark
Mark Herschberg, author of The Career Toolkit
https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com/