What Do Product Managers Do? A 2025 Guide to the PM Role
- cvguys.in
- 8 hours ago
- 10 min read
Introduction – The Mysterious Life of a Product Manager
If you've ever attempted to explain what a Product Manager actually does at a family gathering, you probably know that describing quantum mechanics to your grandmother would be easier. The role is as important as it is nebulous - one minute you are an innovator, the next you are a therapist for disgruntled engineers, then at lunch you are negotiating peace between sales and design. It's no wonder that 69% of product managers deem their role a leadership role, even though the title doesn't necessarily convey the message.
Make no mistake, it is the ambiguity of the role that makes Product Managers scarce. In today's competitive environment, especially in the United States where more than 26,000 product Manager jobs are posted to LinkedIn every week, product has become the centerpiece of most companies in the US.
However, it's a competitive market: on a global scale, there is only one Product Management job opening for approximately every 37 PMs actively looking for work, and 810,000 experienced candidates competing for just 22,000 jobs! If you are feeling especially audacious, you may call it "survival of the fittest", but most PMs just call it "Tuesday."
But what about the few who make it through the gauntlet? Well, your bank account is one immediate benefit. The average product manager salary in the US is between $126,000 to $143,000 and that number increases with elevated titles or specialization. Not too shabby for a job where half of the time, your full time deliverable is really just a well organized spreadsheet and a slight look of panic.
But why in the world are so many people pursuing this role? Perhaps it is the thrill of building something from nothing, the satisfaction of solving real problems, or maybe just the pure bliss of being able to say, “I told you so,” when a product kicks ass. Whatever the reason, and whether you think it’s exciting or not, product management we realize is super competitive and only going to be more interesting.
The Role Defined – Wearing Many Hats (And Sometimes a Cape)
If you've ever seen someone juggle flaming swords on a unicycle, you just witnessed a day in the life of a Product Manager—minus the circus tent (although some meetings may feel like a circus). In a nutshell, the Product Manager's job is to be the connector between users, business objectives, and technical teams to ensure everyone is walking (or at least shuffling) in the same direction.
Product Managers are accountable for all aspects of product development from concept to launch, and beyond. This means it is not just dreaming up features. A Product Manager will conduct market research, define the product vision, build the product roadmap, and then work with designs, engineers, marketing, and sales to deliver the complete solution. In fact, 80% of product managers address both design activities and go-to-market decisions and this illustrates how versatile and busy this role can be.
Product Managers are data analysts, interpreting customer requests and market trends to help determine what next steps make the most sense. They are prioritization experts, helping to establish which features to include and which features to "maybe someday" pile. They can also be diplomats, helping to settle disputes and get people aligned who may represent different priorities.
This cross-functional leadership isn’t just a walk in the park. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts employment for industrial product managers to increase by 3% from 2023-2033, meaning there are always more than 17,000 new job openings (including those resulting from retirements or transitions)—this is evidence that organizations view PMs as a valuable asset for innovation and growth.
So, if you’ve transitioned between big big-picture ideas and the mini nitty-gritty details—if people have described you in a team as the “glue”—you might be wearing a few of those PM hats already.
Product Strategy – Visionaries, Not Fortune Tellers
If you picture Product Managers spending their time looking into crystal balls and predicting the next big thing, you are only half right—their crystal balls are usually dashboards and spreadsheets. At its core, the role of the PM is product strategy, deciding where the product is going, why it is going there, and getting everyone else along for the ride with you. In 2025, all product leaders believe that strategy is the most valuable part of the job, and product strategy is the most important responsibility of PMs around the world.
However, strategy is more than making lofty proclamations and using buzzwords. Today's PMs are focused on forms of outcomes (not just outputs), and it's significant to note that according to the 2025 State of Product Management Report, the majority of PMs measure their success through verifiable real world evidence of the impact ostensibly generated by their product (i.e. customer satisfaction and business growth versus completed feature checklists).
In this sense, PMs have to balance user experience, business objectives, technology and engineering in real time, while attempting to memorize competitive information and recommendations related to trends.
Today customer feedback is the north star for most product strategies. Most PMs feel that aligning product direction with user insights is essential and make an effort to weave customers’ perspectives into their decision-making processes regularly. Some of the best PMs demonstrate a dogged “why?” mentality—not just to their teams, but also to themselves, their stakeholders, and sometimes even their pets.
And while AI and data-informed decision-making have grown considerably, PMs do not adopt technology for the sake of technology. PMs are looking at ways to employ technology and data to deliver real customer solutions and yield real results.
So if you are someone who enjoys making connections, breaking down assumptions, and charting the course when surrounded by uncertainty, you might find that you have an inner product strategist waiting to embrace the way forward!
Research & Discovery – The Art of Asking ‘Why?’
You might have seen a toddler interrogate the world around them with a plethora of "why?" questions. If so, you are catching a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a Product Manager—albeit one who talks to stakeholders, users, and in the case of the occasional caffeine hunt, to themselves in the coffee machine. Wherever a product is, however it finds itself on a roadmap, there is a relentless curiosity about what customers really need, and more importantly, what motivates them.
In fact, user-centricity is now the leading skill for PMs in 2025. High-performing PMs spend a large portion of their time conducting customer research, chatting with customers through interviews, and exploring all the juicy nuggets of feedback from their user base.
In fact, market research is not just something you do at the beginning of product development, it is the north star for all of the decisions they are going to have to make. PMs must be able to gather insights through various traditional sources (e.g., customer interviews, surveys, user testing, focus groups) and non-traditional sources (e.g., social media polls).
Defining customer feedback as the single most important contributor to shaping their product roadmap, over 70% of product managers cited customer feedback. This user-centricity means not only listening to your customers, but decoding the problems customers do not always directly describe.
But research isn't just about gathering information it's about making sense of the information. PMs must be able to analyze evidence from information they are inundated with, recognize patterns in that evidence, and convert the observations into actions plans.
More seasoned PMs are moving away from assumptions based on experience to utilising data to make decisions. Analytics have now become so advanced that 68% of PMs use analytics tools to test their assumptions and rank features.
Naturally, all aspects of discovery are about being humble and questioning your deep rooted beliefs and biases. Great PMs realize that it doesn't matter if they're a digital customer, all that matters is whether they resolved genuine problems for real people. So, if you find yourself continuing to ask “why” until your team is hiding behind a whiteboard, you're likely headed in the right direction!
Roadmaps & Prioritization – The Juggling Act
It's like juggling flaming torches while someone keeps throwing you more—isn't that what a Product Manager has to deal with in terms of roadmaps and prioritization? Product Managers are constantly juggling user needs, business needs, and technical realities of their product, determining which features get developed and which features get nicely parked for "future consideration."
In fact, the ability to make prioritization decisions has been recognized as one of the most important traits for Product Managers because it can impact product success and also has been shown to impact the sanity of the product team.
The stakes are high: it can be the difference between a product people love and a product people loathe. Survey results indicate that Product Managers that make prioritization decisions well are 40% more likely to meet on-time and materially-matched product budgets.
Now you know why product managers earn in the upper echelon of organizational salaries: the average product manager salary in India has exceeded ₹37.4 lakhs and the highest performers earn over ₹71 lakhs.
The next time you see a Product Manager deep in thought, they are not dreaming away - they are actually weighing out dozens of competing requests, overlapping timelines, and "urgent" emails. If you love making prioritization decisions and enjoy creating order out of chaos, then you very likely have the Product Manager prioritization gene.
Cross-Functional Leadership – Herding Cats, Building Empires
Being a Product Manager often feels like being the conductor of an orchestra—except half the musicians are playing different songs and the other half are asking why they are even there. The secret sauce is incredible communication and leadership skills.
In 2025, communication continues to be one of the top three skills for PMs, where more than 80% of successful product managers say that communication is critical in unifying teams and aligning stakeholders.
PMs have to bring together designers, engineers, marketers, and executives around a common vision—usually, without formal authority. This means translating industry-specific technical language for teams focused on business, simplifying business Objectives and Key Results (OKR) formats for engineers, and making sure everyone feels they have been heard.
As one industry expert said, “Soft skills are the differentiator—what separates a good Product Manager from a great Product Manager. These are the skills that create cohesion and collaboration of teams behind a common vision and help them work through barriers together" (Rath, 2022).
It is more than just speaking; it requires listening, taking in information, providing empathy, and interpreting one's message for different audiences. PMs that master this execution build trust, create collaboration, and continuously move work forward—even if the roadmap currently looks like a spaghetti diagram. If you like to build consensus and inspire teams, you might actually be on your way to becoming a cross-functional leader.
Launch, Learn, Iterate – The Product Lifecycle Never Sleeps
In terms of a Product Manager, product launches aren't a finish line, they just signal the start of the race. Once released, the Product Manager's job is to analyze data, gather user feedback and reviews and chart a course for incremental improvement. In 2025, data-driven product management is big business: 70%+ of Product Managers use analytics and user data to improve features, address user pain points, and increase adoption.
You need to have technical fluency, but you don't necessarily need to be developed to accomplish this task. The distinction is that understanding the performance of the product and its respective metrics-churn, retention, and conversion rate- to develop/evaluate the scenarios before releasing them is where Product Management intersects with the human behavioral side of the task.
A good Product Manager can identify the performance and quickly adjust the strategy to accommodate for changing user needs, market factors, etc.
The world is constantly changing. The best Product Managers see every product launch as an opportunity to learn and grow and recognize that it may take multiple iterations to get to "the right" product that users truly want.
If data feedback loops excite you and you enjoy translating insights into actionable items, congratulations, you are already thinking like a 21st century Product Manager.
The Introspective PM – Is This You?
After considering the many roles, skill sets, and opportunities of product management, it’s time for some self-reflection. Are you ready to step into a role where curiosity, determination, and flexibility are as important as technical skills? If you’ve been responding with a nod (and maybe even a little laugh from the unpredictable anxiety) then you may be on your way to being a PM.
Product Manager is not another profession; it is a career path full of growth and evolution. As a PM, you can start as an Associate Product Manager or level on as a ‘chief’ role to title of Chief Product Officer. In 2-5 years, you could develop from initiation to owning your own work stream.
In 5-8 years, you could evolve from owning work streams to mentoring new PM’s and leading heavy cross-functional teams. If you stay in the profession for a decade or longer, you can be a principal PM, Director, or Chief Product Officer; you would not only need technical strategy and vision but now infuse life and passion into the broader organization!
The demand for PMs is only increasing. In fact, companies that have a customer experience focus outpace their competitors by 4-8% in revenue, and companies with strong digital product management capabilities have nearly three times the likelihood of achieving their business objectives.
This tells me that your work as a PM does not just move the needle, it can change entire businesses. Not to mention the financial component as well, the average salary for PMs in the U.S. is currently sitting around $127,000 and strong PMs in India can earn upwards of ₹3,500,000, which is quite noteworthy.
PMs actually get to solve meaningful problems and build user experiences into reality. They thrive in the unstructured - love to learn from failure, pet the kittens and allow others to sometimes take the lead. In today's economy where 61% of PMs are expected to bring AI and automation into their products and the rest of us are beginning to wade into digital transformation, I've made the case repeatedly, the biggest assets any PM can have are adaptability and a growth mindset.
Ask yourself - do you enjoy connecting the dots between customer needs and business goals? Do you have the ability to balance empathy with difficult decisions? Do you feel energized in collaborative environments, as a result of feedback and the journey of building something new? If yes, you are probably already thinking like a Product Manager - and the world needs more like you.
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Disclaimer – This post is intended for informative purposes only, and the names of companies and brands used, if any, in this blog are only for reference. Please refer our terms and conditions for more info. Images credit: Freepik, AI tools.
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