The Role of Product Management in High-tech Companies

Product managers in high-tech companies are responsible for:

1. Defining Product Strategy

2. Ensuring Product Development Delivers on Strategy

3. Enabling Go-to-Market Teams to Deliver on Strategy

4. Tracking Product Success to Learn, Validate and Adapt

1. Defining Product Strategy

At its core, product management defines what to build and why. Product strategy answers the critical questions that guide investment and execution:

• Which problem do we solve, and for whom?

• What value proposition and differentiation will convince customers to buy our product?

• How will we go to market, which segments do we target first?

• How will our solution evolve over time, and how do we make money?

• Through which channels do we engage with and serve customers?

• Which technologies, platforms, and processes do we need to develop ourselves, and what can we outsource?

• What timelines do we assume for market development, product evolution, and enabling technologies?

• How do we ensure return on investment?

In short, product strategy connects customer value, business value, and technical feasibility into a coherent plan that guides all product-related decisions.

2. Ensuring Product Development Delivers on Strategy

Product management translates strategy into a clear, validated scope for product development, at the level of programs, projects, or sprints.

The role is to ensure that:

• Customer requirements (from users and buyers) and business requirements (enabling marketing, sales, delivery, support, etc.) are well defined and prioritized.

• Acceptance criteria for success are established early and validated through customer discovery, interviews, mock-ups, prototypes, or system tests.

• Trade-offs between scope, cost, and timelines are managed as insights evolve from markets, customers, and R&D.

Without this ongoing alignment, development teams risk building technically impressive products that miss the mark commercially or operationally.

3. Enabling Go-to-Market Teams to Deliver on Strategy

A product strategy is only as good as its execution in the market. Product management ensures go-to-market teams (marketing, sales, and customer success) can effectively translate product strategy into customer impact.

This means providing e.g.:

• Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and target account lists to focus sales and marketing.

• Value propositions, positioning, and messaging grounded in real customer value.

• Product documentation and evidence to support claims and proof points.

• Pricing guidance informed by value, competition, and market maturity.

• Promotion & channel strategy to determine how the product is marketed, sold, delivered, and supported.

During launch and throughout the lifecycle, product managers must stay close to the field, learning from customer feedback, enabling teams, and continuously improving go-to-market effectiveness.

4. Tracking Product Success to Validate, Learn, and Adapt

Every strategic and product decision starts as a hypothesis. While early validation experiments can be used to reduce risk, true validation happens only in the market. Product management must track success across strategy, development, go-to-market, and financial performance to drive learning and adaptation.

Key questions include:

• Are we generating growing demand and predictable sales?

• Can we communicate our value effectively?

• Are customers buying for the reasons we expect?

• Are they satisfied, reordering, and advocating?

• Are we achieving the revenue, margin, and adoption targets that justify our investment?

Tracking enables data-driven learning and prioritisation, replacing opinion-based debates with insight-based decisions.

Why It Matters, Especially in Hardware

Failure to fulfill these roles leads to predictable breakdowns:

• Lack of strategic clarity > building the wrong product, scattered go-to-market efforts, and weak commercial traction.

• Lack of product focus > frustration in R&D, product decisions made by engineers, and suboptimal customer and business value.

• Lack of go-to-market focus > frustration in marketing and sales, fragmented messaging, and low sales productivity.

• Lack of tracking > opinion-driven decision making instead of evidence-based learning.

These risks are amplified in hardware and complex systems, where development and sales cycles are long, and mistakes are costly. Unlike software, you cannot fix a strategic error in the next sprint. Product management in high-tech therefore must drive cross-functional alignment and learning across strategy, development, go-to-market, and performance tracking, ensuring the entire organization moves as one.