What Decisions Do You Actually Own?

Ask ten people what a product manager does, and you may get ten different answers.

One owns a backlog. Another defines requirements. Another spends most of the week with customers. Another runs a $50 million product line and recommends where the business should invest.

Same title. Wildly different decisions.

That is why I have become less interested in the title and more interested in a different question:

What decisions are you actually responsible for?

A backlog choice and a recommendation to commit millions of dollars may both sit somewhere inside “product management,” but they require very different evidence, business judgment, and organizational authority. The title does not tell you which work is really being done.

This is not a software-versus-hardware argument. Product work exists in software, AI, firmware, connected devices, industrial equipment, and physical products that may never appear in a browser. The products differ. The consequences differ. The decisions differ.

For an executive, that distinction matters. A product organization can be full of capable people doing exactly what they have been asked to do and still leave an important gap between product activity and business recommendations. The issue may not be talent. It may be the level at which decisions are being made.

So maybe we should spend less time arguing about what a product manager is and more time understanding what decisions product people are expected to own.

I have started calling that decision altitude.

Over the next several weeks, I am going to explore how product work changes as that altitude rises—from implementation choices, to individual product choices, to product-business choices, and ultimately to the boundaries set by the company itself.

Before we debate titles, it helps to understand the decisions behind them.