Meant to serve as a standardized philosophy about product management. Eventually, this needs to become a single entity. Here is what exists so far.

From Adam:

Product management is the function of serving as a proxy to a defined set of markets (or market segments), in order to be able to ensure appropriate product creation, and ongoing product health and quality for those markets throughout a product’s entire lifecycle, until end of life.

From Scott:

Product Managers understand markets and the problems faced in those markets. Product managers choose the problems to solve, prioritize those problems, and communicate this knowledge to the people who build solutions. Product managers engage customers and learn from them, continuously improving their products, as long as it is valuable enough. Product management is the job of being a product manager.

From Stewart:

Product Managers represent the voice of their existing markets ensuring accurate problem definition and solution facilitation for the sole purpose of sustainable product evolution.

Definition Elements from Lars

• Customer - customers and potential customers make up the market. Product managers can interact with customers and potential customers to understand the market.
• Market - a group of people with overlapping needs and problems. Product managers can interact with the market through market research and their product offerings
• Problem - people in the market have problems. Product managers have to analyze these problems and determine interdependence between problems, determine desirability (market view), technical feasibilty (technology view) and profitability of a potential solution.
• Product - a product is an attempt at solving problems in the market through a combination of technological, social and process factors
• Solution - product managers have to specify solutions in terms of product specifications and map them to problems detected in the market. These solutions have to be monitored regarding implementation and quality (technology view), market adoption and competitive reaction (market view) and profitability.