Are you growing as a PM?

Once in a while, I get questions about what should we expect from the Product Managers. Ideally, PMs are empowered to define their work and set expectations from them. While "seeking" clarity is definitely important for everyone, the Product Managers at any level is actually responsible for "bringing" clarity and value.

So while you set on your mission to bring clarity and value in whatever way you can, here's a list of things that you are also expected to do. You can use them to set expectations with your PM teams and also self evaluate your contribution and growth as a PM in any organization. 

1. Manage Outcomes: Focus on achieving the intended outcome expected from a product/feature. Don't stop at building features, ensure quality, adoption, and proper usage or whatever is the expected outcome. Move the metrics, or change the meters.


2. Deal with chaos: Understand the need of the hour and bring clarity for the team, be flexible, expect requirements/market to change, and plan for it. Constantly course-correct your understanding and estimations of priority, impact, and effort. Set up PM processes to help you achieve this. 


3. Document everything: Write clear, detailed, readable, unambiguous specs. Document your backlog, roadmap, sprints, and key decisions. Includes release notes, user guides, demos, sales presentations.


4. Update up: Inform and assist the reporting manager in carrying out their work, it may mean creating a list for this and a list for that. It also means being on top of all assigned tasks and completing them in the expected time frame, and raising red/orange flags about things that need reporting manager's attention.


5. Manage the development process: Run sprints, actively monitor progress, and constantly unblock the design, marketing, and engineering teams, take steps to ensure they are motivated and able to perform their best.


6. Manage peers: Keep all stakeholders informed and engaged. Be aware of their needs and set their expectations correctly. It can get overwhelming at times, but, being data-oriented, clear, and positive is the key.


7. Improve status quo: Bring in new ideas, try new tools/processes, unearth new problems, and better ways to solve them. Make the product/culture/company and world better for yourself and everyone.


Periodically, you can go through this checklist and assess if you are doing 5-star work in all these things and have demonstrable evidence of your contribution. If not, you are not growing in all the areas that you potentially can. So, get going with it. 

Thoughts?