As a product/program manager, your role is to aggregate the best ideas, analyze them, and build a plan to ship a product (or a segment of one) that solves specific customer problems. When you are assigned a product or a feature, your first goal should be to get some of your thoughts in front of real customers and start building an understanding of how they would use your product. I recall at one point the design team and I worked on some mock-ups for a feature in Outlook that we re-did five or six times, purely because we were very closely engaged with customers and we found issues that we haven’t seen before we actually talked to people using our tooling day in and day out.