Product Development and Marketing are two clear and key roles in a product-based company.

The Product Development area is responsible for creating the product or products (that is, creating a portfolio) as understood by the department´s leaders and their conversations throughout the company and outside. In a High Tech company, this implies a huge amount of research on both the state of the art (we could call it Research) and on competitors (Competitive Intelligence), and, of course, a great amount of engineering skills and infrastructure to design, develop, test and document the product.

Marketing has also many different areas, but one of them is very related to the product, and is called Product Marketing, and it must answer the following core questions:

• What products will be offered (i.e., the breadth and depth of the product line)?
• Who will be the target customers (i.e., the boundaries of the market segments to be served)?
• How will the products reach those customers (i.e., the distribution channels to be used)?
• Why will customers prefer our products to those of competitors (i.e., the distinctive attributes and value to be provided)?

In the middle, there is a gap where the Product Management area resides. The product manager is responsible for defining – in detail – the product to be built, and validate that product with real customers and users. The product marketing person is responsible for telling the world about that product, managing the product launch, providing tools for the sales channel to market and sell the product, and for leading key programs such as online marketing and influencer marketing programs. 

Product management is not about pricing, promotions, positioning and messaging, or product launch activities. Nor is it about online marketing and customer acquisition strategies or influencer marketing programs.

 
On the other hand, Product Management is not about UML models, state-of-the-art algorithms, optimization or low-level features or QA infrastructure. A PM´s responsibility is to adequately and efficienty transform customers´, marketing and sales requirements into user benefits but letting Product Development implement them somehow into the product.

 
The product manager is responsible for discovering a product that is useful, usable and feasible.

Specifically, the main tasks of a Product Manager should be the following:

• Write, update and maintain the Product Requirements Document (PRD).
• Validate the Market Requirements Document (MRD), that comes from Product Marketing.
• Understand the company´s positioning and targeting, and help position the product in those areas. This means:
• Understanding the area´s specific needs
• Competitive Intelligence. Both generic and vertical.
• User Experience
• Talking to customers: PM should be responsible for talking to customers about their experience with the product installed, good or bad, in an honest attempt to improve the product in the near or mid-term future. PM is not selling, nor is “defending” the product, but understanding how customers use it.