Product Manager

Working with agents

Product managers help the team choose problems worth solving and explain what a useful result would look like. Agent-assisted delivery needs that context.

A request such as “make checkout better” leaves important choices open. Describe the user’s problem, relevant constraints and how the team will check whether the change helps.

Keep the brief as short as the task allows. Agree decision boundaries with engineering and design, and use findings from real work to improve the next brief.

Experience to discuss

Discuss a difficult product choice, how the person understood the problem and what they learned after delivery. Ask how they communicated with the team and used evidence to revisit a decision. Include agent-assisted examples where they fit the work.

Responsibilities and skills

Purpose

Help the team solve a useful problem, make the expected result clear and check the effect on users after delivery.

Responsibilities to discuss

• Explain what to build and why during the Plan phase
• Write clear acceptance criteria that people and agents can use to check the result
• Review agent output for product correctness: does the feature solve the user's problem?
• Choose the detail the task needs, including constraints and examples of acceptable results
• Track product outcome metrics (adoption, retention, satisfaction) alongside delivery metrics
• Review whether delivered work addresses the intended user need
• Discuss priorities with engineering, including feasibility, cost and trade-offs
• Participate in the Verify phase, validating that agent output meets product acceptance criteria before release

Skills for this work

These role-specific skills complement the five shared competencies. Choose examples relevant to the work and support people as they practice.

• Precision requirements writing — Write requirements with enough context and examples for someone to implement and review them.
• Product judgment at speed — Review priorities and quality when several agent-assisted changes are ready at once.
• Outcome orientation — Review user outcomes alongside delivery measures and explain what each measure can tell the team.
• Agent capability awareness — Know what agents do well and where human judgment must intervene, and shape requirements accordingly.
• Constraint-based thinking — Explain the requirements and limits a solution must respect, and specify steps where the task needs them.
• Data-informed iteration — Use the Learn phase to improve requirement templates and criteria based on what actually shipped and how users responded.

Signals that need more context

Use work examples alongside these signals; none is a complete measure of someone’s ability.

• Document volume without evidence that the requirements helped the team
• Planning-tool expertise without examples of product decisions
• Status reporting without evidence of resolving questions or disagreements
• Backlog activity without an explanation of priorities and outcomes
• "Experience with Agile/Scrum" as a differentiating qualification on its own

Questions to discuss

Adapt these example questions to the role and the person’s opportunities to do the work.

• Requirements precision — "Write acceptance criteria for a 'forgot password' flow that an agent would execute against. What makes your criteria agent-executable versus vague?"
• Product judgment — "An agent built a feature in two hours that satisfies every acceptance criterion. Adoption is flat. What do you investigate first?"
• Constraint definition — An agent will draft a pricing page. What facts, constraints, examples and review steps should its brief include?
• Velocity vs. direction — "Your team shipped three times more features this quarter; NPS fell five points. Diagnose and propose a correction."
• Collaboration — "The AI Architect says a feature is feasible but triples the token budget. The designer says the UX depends on it. Walk through your decision process."

An example day

Illustrative scenario. Use this example to discuss how the responsibilities fit together.

Support reports that users are abandoning a recently released flow. It meets the written criteria, but its second step is confusing. You work with design and engineering to understand the problem and agree a change.

For the next task, you include an example of the user’s goal and the confusing case. You review the result with the team, check what users do with it and update the brief where assumptions proved wrong.

Related HELM guidance

The Product Manager responsibilities contribute to Plan and Verify in the operating loop. Use the Decision Rights Matrix to agree who owns priorities, requirements and release decisions.

Velocity Without Direction and the Product Outcome KPIs help frame questions about results. Principle 2 asks the team to reconsider the work before adding agent steps.