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<aside> 📎 Lead the team to deliver a great product that the nonprofit will actually adopt/use.
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A PM’s job may not be visible to devs, since a lot of their job is cross-functionality. A lot of the interactions with the PM are within the context of a dev night, where they see a lot of the work they do is mainly technical along with some product stuff, including the design, inspiration and clarifying nuances.
SWEs don't see the behind-the-scenes work - the process of the PM arriving to certain decisions: the target user, problem, goals, features etc as well as maintain effective communication and feedback with the client, which arguably is a big chunk of product work a PM does. SWEs often get the "answer", whether it's clarifying a product use case, user pain points, feature details, etc, which is already well-thought out and reasoned by the PM. The PM basically is a shield to all that stuff SWEs don’t care too much about. They take care of all the other things so the developers can focus on building.
So it may seem like PMs are just a TL 2.0 to SWEs, which limits any SWE’s understanding to what a PM is and creates confusion. This document is to bridge this gap, to clarify what PMs do at Hack4Impact and even in industry, which hopefully would create more interest in the product space at UIUC as a whole and perhaps we may be a target school for Associate Product Managers (APM) :P
Nonprofits come to us with problems and potential solutions, but it is really up to the PM to question that and make sure the team is really solving the right problem. Otherwise you end up with a product that no one uses (which is possibly still the case for our products this past semester). High level is focus on the users, remove obstacles for your team so engineers can engineer, and ship a product that your end users will actually use. Thus, the PM role should never just be a Project Management position. Without a true PM, none of our products would have impact. A Product Manager will do whatever it takes to ship an excellent product at the end.
Areas of Focus · Ideation · Planning · Execution · Evaluation
At the end of the day, the Product Manager does anything that is required of him/her to ensure that an impactful product is delivered in a timely manner. In addition, they have the responsibility of leading a team - including its team culture and chemistry.