Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Product managers are the one who bring all the other groups together to manage a product.

There are specialist for everything within a company - sales, manufacturing, engineering, purchasing, etc. The only place that one person controls all of these groups at once is the CEO of the company, who doesn't have the time to manage a product directly. So, positions called product managers are often used.

There are many variations, but this position generally owns the product. they are responsible for the P&L for the products they manage. They have to work with people from all of the other departments to develop new products and maintain current products. One of the main challenges is that though this person is supposed to bring all of these groups together, none of these groups report to the product manager, so they can't just order a person to do something.

This is a general description - the actual roles and responsibilities of product managers varies by company and industry. For example, sometimes the product manager will be in charge of marketing, and other times marketing and other customer facing duties will fall under the scope of a marketing manager or product marketing manager.

I have worked as both product manager and marketing manager in the past.