Ask five product managers what they do all day, and you will get five different answers. One will talk about roadmaps. Another will mention stakeholder management. A third will describe sprint planning. The lack of a shared vocabulary for what product management actually entails is not just an inconvenience. It makes it nearly impossible to hire, evaluate, and develop product managers with any consistency.
At PR_D_CT DAY 2024, Frederic Pattyn brought academic rigour to a question the community has debated for years. As Co-founder and Principal Product Manager at NOWJOBS, Frederic has lived the chaos of wearing too many hats in a startup. As a PhD student at Ghent University and visiting researcher at the University of Bozen-Bolzano, he has spent years cataloguing and classifying the full scope of product management work through systematic literature review.
The result is striking: 122 distinct activities, organised into 33 categories across six domains. His talk walked the audience through this taxonomy, engaged them in interactive polling, and then delivered the uncomfortable punchline about which of those activities actually matter for measurable business outcomes.
