Product Manager = Generalist

So there was one point in my career, while walking through the break room I noticed several job listings. There was one in marketing, one in finance, one in development, a sales engineer, and one in quality assurance. I read through each one and I realized that I could do significant parts of all of the other jobs. At that point, I realized that as a product managers we are generalists. We need to be able to effectively communicate with literally every functional group in the organization to represent our products effectively. Everyone in the organization either doesn't know what Product Management does or only can only tell you the part of Product Management that interfaces with their team. As a result, no one person knows the entire set of all of the responsibilities of a product manager, except the product manager themselves.

This is probably the reason that Product Management location in company org chart varies widely from company to company. In technology dominated company (i.e. where the technology team dominates mindshare), the Product Management team falls under the VP of Engineering or the CTO, etc. In this type of org, they are primarily focused on supporting the needs of engineering such as requirements, etc.

In other companies, Product Management falls under the VP of marketing where they take a more market centric view. This involves product marketing assistance, market research, and competitive analysis. In this org, you see more market requirements than product requirements.

Pragmatic Marketing has a whole eBook on Product Management here.