Sometimes I get the question: "What does an infrastructure product manager do?"

In my somewhat biased opinion, having worked on complicated projects in travel content distribution, fiber optic networking, and cybersecurity training, the infrastructure PM is critical to every other function — providing a platform for every business unit to build and depend upon.

The bigger the infrastructure, the more disparate the technologies in use, the more services living in the cloud, the more important it is to have someone focused on end-to-end delivery — on how a bit, or a dollar, flows from a consumer’s whim to its eventual consumption.

This is not to devalue PMs that focus on external features and functions. Companies that realize the importance of investing in service enablement as a product to be managed — with direct internal stakeholders and indirect external ones — give themselves several advantages:

1. Whereas a Feature PM should have laser focus on their aspect of a product, an Infrastructure PM can keep the bigger picture to help the PM team stay aligned.
2. An Infrastructure PM can focus on internal bottlenecks that affect the external product delivery experience, such as automated service provisioning.
3. With a broader perspective typically comes more cross-functional involvement, which helps to alleviate siloed development efforts — bringing projects together instead of reinventing wheels.

Infrastructure PMs seem few and far between, but we fill a critical need in complex technology environments that serve a global customer base in real time.