name: product-manager
description: Expert product management guidance for day-to-day PM work. Use when creating roadmaps, prioritizing features, managing stakeholders, planning sprints, grooming backlogs, scoping features, planning releases, defining OKRs, managing technical debt, or coordinating go-to-market. Covers RICE, ICE, MoSCoW frameworks, cross-functional collaboration, and product metrics.

Product Manager

Strategic product management expertise for building the right things, in the right order, with the right people.

Philosophy

Great product management isn't about features. It's about outcomes — solving real problems for real users in ways that drive business results.

The best product managers:
1. Obsess over problems, not solutions — Understand deeply before building
2. Say no more than yes — Focus is a feature
3. Bridge all worlds — Connect customers, engineering, design, and business
4. Make decisions reversible — Ship fast, learn faster
5. Own outcomes, not outputs — Features shipped means nothing without impact

How This Skill Works

When invoked, apply the guidelines in rules/ organized by:

• roadmap-* — Roadmap creation, maintenance, and communication
• prioritization-* — RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, and prioritization frameworks
• stakeholder-* — Managing up, down, and across the organization
• sprint-* — Sprint planning, backlog grooming, ceremonies
• scoping-* — Feature scoping, trade-offs, MVP definition
• release-* — Release planning, coordination, communication
• metrics-* — Product metrics, OKRs, success measurement
• debt-* — Technical debt management and balancing

Core Frameworks

The Product Trio

         ┌─────────────────┐
         │     Product     │
         │     Manager     │
         └────────┬────────┘
                  │
    ┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
    │             │             │
    ▼             ▼             ▼
┌────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐
│  UX    │  │Engineering│  │  Data    │
│Designer│  │   Lead    │  │ Analyst  │
└────────┘  └──────────┘  └──────────┘

Prioritization Framework Comparison

The Product Development Loop

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                                  │
│   ┌──────────┐    ┌──────────┐    ┌──────────┐  │
│   │ Discover │───▶│  Define  │───▶│  Develop │  │
│   └──────────┘    └──────────┘    └──────────┘  │
│         ▲                               │        │
│         │         ┌──────────┐          │        │
│         └─────────│  Measure │◀─────────┘        │
│                   └──────────┘                   │
│                                                  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Roadmap Types

The PM Decision Matrix

                    High Confidence
                         │
         ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
         │   VALIDATE    │     SHIP      │
         │  (test more)  │   (execute)   │
Low      │               │               │   High
Impact───┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───Impact
         │    IGNORE     │  INVESTIGATE  │
         │  (say no)     │  (research)   │
         └───────────────┼───────────────┘
                         │
                    Low Confidence

Stakeholder Map

Anti-Patterns

• Feature factory — Shipping without measuring outcomes
• Roadmap theater — Treating roadmaps as promises, not hypotheses
• Stakeholder-driven development — Building what's loudest, not what matters
• Scope creep acceptance — Never saying no to "just one more thing"
• Velocity worship — Optimizing for speed over impact
• Documentation paralysis — Perfect specs over shipping
• The PM as order taker — Writing tickets instead of solving problems
• Ignoring technical debt — Shipping features on a crumbling foundation