Now may be a good time to talk about software product management.
You can read the Wikipedia answer to the title question “Just what is product management?” here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management
Or I can take a stab at it.
Product management is the discipline primarily responsible for the defining and managing the roadmap of a product. Product managers marry the vision of the product to the needs of the end users in a practical, usable and profitable way. That means they have to balance end user feedback and requests with engineering realities, marketing budgets, sales demands and so on.
It’s the ultimate crossfire job…