What is product management? Tools, skills, & tips

It’s a dynamic time in product management. Considering the prevalence of AI, many product managers (and the engineers and designers they work alongside) face the double task of building products that leverage AI while incorporating AI into their own processes and workflows. Airtable found that the majority of product managers still spend as much as 66% of their week on manual tasks, chasing down information, compiling insights, and crafting documentation. That’s time better spent on product strategy, research, and understanding the customer experience. In this article, we’ll take a deeper dive into product management and everything it entails.

What is product management?

Product management helps teams building products bridge the gap between meeting business goals and addressing user needs. It’s an essential discipline that helps companies strategically launch successful products by guiding core decisions throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Product management teams focus on identifying market opportunities, prioritizing customer needs, defining product vision, and coordinating with cross-functional teams and stakeholders across engineering, design, marketing, and sales to bring products to market.

Product management vs. project management

Product management and project management may sound similar, but they are complementary disciplines that serve different purposes. Product management teams focus on what to build and why. Product managers take the long view, owning the strategic product vision, roadmap, and success metrics throughout the product's lifecycle.

Project management is more tactical, helping teams deliver things like product features or marketing campaigns, for example, in the short term. Project managers ensure tasks related to specific initiatives are completed on schedule, within budget, and according to specifications. They may make process-related decisions, but typically not decisions around the end product itself.

What does a product manager do?

Product managers perform a wide variety of tasks, often serving as strategists, researchers, communicators, and decision-makers—though not always all at once. They conduct market research, collect and analyze customer feedback, prioritize new features, address product backlogs, influence pricing, write product requirements documents, and collaborate with development teams.

All of these tasks are in service of defining product roadmaps that blend business objectives (e.g., new customer acquisition) with customer insights (e.g., user feedback from existing customers). Product managers also communicate the product vision across the organization, explaining data-driven decisions about feature development, product launch events, performance metrics, and future iterations.

Why product managers are critical

Product managers help balance competing priorities and ensure your business builds the right product that addresses real customer problems. They do this by paying close attention to market needs, evolving personas, industry dynamics, the competitive landscape, and customer feedback. Beyond defining vision and strategy, product managers also guide product lifecycle management, ensuring that solutions continue to deliver value from launch through maturity.

Without effective product management, teams risk developing technically impressive solutions that aren’t adopted, or products that satisfy internal stakeholders but fail to meet the expectations of end users.

Product management roles

Not every product manager does each of the tasks described. (Though some, perhaps at a startup, do.) In larger organizations, product management jobs are often specialized. Some product managers focus on a single product—or even a specific feature set within a product. Here are a few examples of different roles and product management responsibilities:

What are the most important product management skills?

Strategic thinking

Product managers must think strategically about market fit (alongside product marketing teams, who are more focused on the positioning), the competitive landscape, and long-term product evolution—while making tactical and data-driven decisions about immediate priorities.

Data analysis

Product managers need strong analytical skills to interpret user behavior, market trends, and product performance metrics to make informed decisions and measure success. That said, this is a clear area where technology can help. For example, with ProductCentral, you can lean on AI to provide analysis across product operations, customer insights, product strategy, and team-level execution.

Communication

Articulating product vision requires strong written and verbal communication skills. Looping back to strategic thinking, product managers work day-to-day with a wide variety of team members— from product owners in engineering to UX designers to executives—which requires tailored communication for each audience.

Empathy

It’s important that product managers take the time to validate assumptions against real customer needs, pain points, and behaviors. Product managers accomplish this through research, interviews, and data analysis.

Technical acumen

Product managers don’t need to know how to code, but they do need to be hands-on enough to understand what it will take to produce a certain product capability. Every team across the organization must be careful not to overpromise to ensure product success.

AI

AI is quickly becoming a must-have skill for product managers. To deliver the AI-powered experiences customers now expect, product leaders need to first embrace AI in their own operations. In fact, 55% of product leaders are already investing in it.

Far from replacing people, AI is fueling growth: an Airtable survey found that teams leaning heavily into AI are also expanding in size, budget, and scope. 

And with AI-powered product management tools like Airtable ProductCentral, it’s easier to get product teams to adopt AI. For example, ProductCentral comes with Omni, your AI collaborator, ready to help teams build custom apps, analyze data, and answer questions instantly, so product teams can focus on strategy, not manual work.

What is the product management process?

1. Discovery and research

The process begins with identifying opportunities through market research, user interviews, competitive analysis, and internal stakeholder feedback to understand problems worth solving.

2. Strategy and planning

Product managers define product vision, establish success metrics, and create roadmaps. A key part of this process is ensuring product-market fit—prioritizing features and initiatives that deliver real business value, address user needs, and remain technically feasible

3. Development and execution

Working closely with engineering and design teams, product managers guide the development process through requirements definition, sprint planning, and iterative feedback cycles.

4. Launch and go-to-market marketing strategy

Product managers coordinate launch activities with marketing, sales, and customer success teams to ensure that the product stands the best chances for success—in terms of positioning and promotion, and in anticipation of questions that prospects and customers may ask.

5. Monitoring and optimization

After launch, product managers must track key performance indicators against goals, solicit or monitor user feedback, analyze usage patterns, and begin planning for future iterations.

What is agile product management?

Agile product management applies agile principles to developing digital products, emphasizing iterative delivery, customer collaboration, and adaptability over rigid planning. This approach helps teams refine value propositions, improve usability, and align product design with evolving market needs.

In agile environments, product managers work in short cycles—often within a scrum framework—continuously gathering feedback and adjusting priorities as new information emerges. They participate in sprint planning and collaborate closely with development teams to deliver meaningful value in small increments, while maintaining alignment with the broader strategic vision.

Product management tools

Product managers use a variety of sophisticated tools to help streamline their workflows and inform decision-making. They may use a combination of:

All-in-one product management solutions like ProductCentral bring these capabilities together in a single platform, eliminating the need to juggle multiple tools.

Product management best practices 

Product management is not an easy job. Sometimes you need to say no to good ideas so that you can focus on the really great, or most impactful ones. Here are a few best practices:

Focus on outcomes over shipping

Successful product managers measure success by focusing on customer and business outcomes rather than just considering feature delivery. The goal is to provide a valuable solution, not to check off tasks (or features) on a list. (Though if you’re looking for a product launch checklist, Airtable has you covered.)

Embrace AI as a partner

76% of product leaders expect their investment in AI to grow next year, and it’s no surprise. From automating routine tasks to uncovering insights hidden in mountains of data, AI can act as a true collaborator. The best product managers lean on AI to free up time for strategy, creativity, and customer connection, while still staying in control of critical decisions.

Back assumptions with evidence 

Lean into solutions that can help you base product planning decisions on quantitative data and qualitative insights (as opposed to assumptions or stakeholder opinions). Many solutions, including ProductCentral, can help you regularly analyze user behavior, market trends, and performance in real time.

Maintain strong cross-functional relationships

As the saying goes: Teamwork makes the dream work. Build trust and alignment across the organization through transparent communication, providing regular updates, and making collaborative decisions that consider diverse perspectives.

Channel the voice of your customer

Great product decisions start with listening. Tools like ProductCentral make it easy to continuously collect and analyze customer feedback to understand real needs, pain points, and expectations. By grounding roadmaps and priorities in the voice of your customer, product managers ensure they’re solving problems that truly matter, building trust, loyalty, and long-term impact.

Product management trends

In this era of AI, there is a lot to balance—but also, AI can help. Here are a few product management trends to consider.

What are the challenges in product management?

1. Measuring ROI and business impact

Challenge:
Although 92% of product leaders are now responsible for revenue (up from just 45% in 2022), only 26% report having very high visibility into the ROI of their product launches. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to prove business impact and prioritize the right initiatives.

Solution:
Implement advanced product analytics and reporting tools that connect product performance to business outcomes. By integrating product data with revenue metrics, product managers can better quantify the impact of launches, communicate value to stakeholders, and prioritize features that drive measurable returns.

2. Managing customer feedback at scale

Challenge:
40% of product leaders still depend on manual teams to sift through the overwhelming volume of customer feedback. This not only slows down decision-making but also increases the risk of overlooking critical customer needs.

Solution:
Adopt AI-powered feedback management systems that automatically categorize, prioritize, and analyze feedback across channels. This approach reduces manual effort, highlights recurring themes, and empowers product managers to focus on solving the most pressing customer problems.

3. Adapting to AI in product management

Challenge:
A common misconception is that AI threatens human jobs, leading some organizations to underinvest in transformative tools. However, our survey data shows that teams investing heavily in AI are actually growing in size, budget, and scope, suggesting missed opportunities for those who hesitate.

Solution:
Reframe AI adoption as an enabler rather than a threat. Product managers should use AI to augment their workflows—accelerating market analysis, personalizing customer experiences, and optimizing roadmaps—while leveraging human creativity for strategy, empathy, and innovation. This creates a future-ready product function that scales more effectively.

Product management example

Walmart is a strong example of product management because it blends speed, scale, and customer obsession in a way few companies can. By collapsing discovery and design cycles from months to minutes and empowering individuals to span roles traditionally divided between product, design, and engineering, Walmart prioritizes outcomes over process. Every initiative is anchored in the “job to be done,” with simple but high-impact improvements—like mobile clock-in, instant time-off approvals, and one-click HR changes—removing friction from the daily work of millions of associates. The company’s deliberate move from 280 fragmented systems to a single, consumer-grade app further shows its commitment to simplifying complexity and delivering tools that are as intuitive for employees as those offered to customers.

What sets Walmart apart is its culture of experimentation and empowerment. Leaders model new behaviors, using generative AI tools themselves and encouraging teams to adopt them as amplifiers of their impact. Organizational design is treated like a product, with experiments in team structure and a cross-segment Product Ops Consortium to share best practices across the enterprise. Rather than chasing technology for its own sake, Walmart continually refines processes to maximize speed, adoption, and value creation. At massive scale, this disciplined focus on removing friction, simplifying experiences, and empowering people demonstrates the essence of great product management.

Learn more about Walmart's approach in our conversation with Ben Peterson, VP, People Product & Design.

Product management made easy with ProductCentral 

Airtable ProductCentral is a flexible, AI-powered solution that brings every stage of product development—strategy, planning, and shipping—into one place. It turns customer feedback into roadmap-ready insights, aligns distributed teams into a coordinated portfolio engine, and delivers the clarity you need to ensure every sprint drives your top priorities forward.

See for yourself by booking a demo.