Your 4 Main Responsibilities as PM

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

As a PM, there will be a lot of things you need to do. From communication, product discovery, product development, and many others. However, if you want to simplify it, you have 4 responsibilities.

1. Vision
2. Strategy
3. Tactic
4. Review

Let’s brief it a bit by a bit

Vision

Vision is a goal or a belief that you want to achieve with your product. As a PM, you need to understand and believe the vision of your product. Otherwise, your team won’t believe and follow you. Hence, it will make it difficult for you to achieve your goal in the product. The vision shouldn’t come necessarily from you, especially because you usually are assigned and task with the product from your lead or stakeholder. However, you should understand and believe it so your team would believe it

Strategy

Strategy is a big picture action plan you and your team need to do to achieve the vision. Usually, it is also referred to as initiatives. It usually includes action plans from product discovery, product development, product release, to product reviews. As a PM, you need to determine this so you understand, what steps are you in right and measure your activity in that step

Tactic

Tactic is what you need to do to achieve each of those strategies. Usually, you will need to collaborate with many peers to work on it. For example, to work on product discovery, you need to collaborate with UX researchers. To work on product development, you need to collaborate with software engineers and UI designers.

Review

Review is what you need to do once everything is done. It is the final step you do to see if all those strategies and tactics you have done. Usually, you will do it together with your team members and stakeholders to measure what you and the team have done. After that, the rest of the team and you will determine the next plan after review

To make it easier to understand, let’s take an example. Let’s say you are a new employee. You have a goal to always arrive on time at the office in the first month. What will you do to achieve it? Let’s use the above framework to plan your action

1. Goal: To be the best new employee of the month
2. Strategy: Sleep early, wake up at 5 AM, leave home at 7 AM, arrive at the office at 8 AM
3. Tactic: (sleep early) don’t watch TV/youtube before sleeping, (wake up at 5 AM)quickly wash your face after waking up, don’t go to sleep again, take exercise. (leave home at 7 AM) have breakfast and take a bath before 7 AM. (arrive at the office at 8 AM) make sure your fuel is not empty, check the map for the quickest route before leaving
4. Review: Did you always arrive on time at the office? If yes, what will you do next? If no, what did you do wrong?

Understanding where you are standing at your issue will help you determine your action plan. If you are stuck at a goal, you should clarify it with your lead/stakeholders. If you are stuck at strategy, you need to see in the big picture, where the issue is. If you are stuck at tactics, you should look into it deeper to see what the problem is. If you are stuck at review, you probably don’t stop enough to reflect.