Who is a product manager ?

The answer to this question is very broad based. It depends on the kind of organization that you might find yourself defining this role for. At a small startup the product manager ties together product mock-ups, liaises with the developers to execute and get a working product on a an agreed timeline, conducts informal end user interviews. At a mid-sized technology company, you will find him running planning meetings with designers and developers, negotiate roadmaps with the senior executives, works with his colleagues in sales and operations to understand and prioritize user needs. At large enterprise organizations, a product manager may rewrite feature requests as "user stories", work on analysing data for the product requests, attending a whole lot of meetings.

In general, as a product manager, you will probably find yourself doing a lot of different things at various times, and what these things are keep changing instantaneously. However, there a few things that remain common for a product manager across industries, business models or company sizes :

1. A product manager has lots of responsibility but very little authority
2. If somethings needs to get done, it is part of your job
3. You are the glue that holds the product together

What is it that your are not ?

1. You are not the boss
2. You are not the one building the product yourself
3. You cannot wait for someone to to tell you what to do

Great product managers are people with wide range of experiences, all the challenges they have faced and also the learnings from all the people they have worked with directly or indirectly. They constantly learn, evolve and adapt their own skills and practices to meet the needs of their users, teams and organizations.