Roles and teams
Product manager (PM)
Also calledPM, Product management
The person accountable for whether a product area moves its business metric: they decide which problems to solve, in what order, and check that it worked.
A product manager owns an outcome rather than a feature list. They spend their week on discovery, deciding priorities, aligning stakeholders and reading the data that says whether the last release did what it was meant to.
The role sits between customers, the business and engineering. It is a decision-making job more than a production one: a good PM says no far more often than yes.
In many companies the same person also runs a squad's backlog. That combination works for one squad and breaks once a PM covers two or more, which is usually when a separate product owner appears.
Common mistake
Letting backlog grooming swallow the week. The clearest sign is a roadmap made entirely of requests, with no bets the team chose itself.