This post was originally published by Ally Mexicotte on her Medium blog.
When people think of a career as a developer, it’s relatively common knowledge that there are many types of developers and that it’s important to specify what kind of developer you’d like to be. That doesn’t seem to be as common for those in product management roles.
Compared to the older fields of design, development, and marketing, product management is still an awkward teenager, figuring out its identity. The role technically existed as early as the 1940s, but it really started to gain popularity when Google created its Associate Product Manager program in 2002. Today, many companies are still stumbling through how to leverage strong product practices, never mind understanding the different specializations within product managers.
This unfamiliarity with the distinctions between different product specializations has very real consequences on hiring and retaining employees. On average, it takes about 80 hours to hire for a single role. If you’ve hired the wrong product skillset, it may take another ~6 months to realize and build up the conviction to make a change, where you would spend another several weeks or months to hire the right product profile.
On the other side of the fence, many applicants aren’t aware what kind of PM they already are (or want to be) either. When I first started applying to various product management roles, I was applying to each role as if all product roles were looking for the same general criteria. I didn’t customize my resume or interview answers for the different types of product roles, and as a result my job search took many more months than it needed to.
When I got my first product role, I was just happy to be a product manager. My peers and mentors didn’t really talk about the different types of product managers, so it wasn’t until I went to the Mind the Product conference many years later where I was exposed to product managers from other industries and companies that I started wondering what type of product manager I was.
I think more product mentors should ask their mentees “what kind of product manager are you, and what do you want to be?”
If you’re already a product manager and looking to transition into a different specialization within product (0 to 1 vs. growth, for instance), it’s imperative to understand what kind of product manager you are so you can start to identify which frameworks, metrics, and ways of working will or won’t transfer over in a new context. It requires self reflection about what parts of the job you love and dislike so that you can ultimately hone into what you do best. Additionally, this low effort high impact pattern recognition will give you a leg up in building a successful product.
Below I’ve listed 8 types of product managers and identified how they are similar and different from each other so you can start to articulate better what kind of product manager you are.
1. 0 to 1 Product Manager
A 0 to 1 product manager is usually launching a new product and is trying to find product-market fit (PMF). Usually these roles are a bit more creative since you’re building something that doesn’t exist yet, and require a strong ability to create structure out of the big, wide open greenfield possibilities.
Data analytics platforms usually haven’t been built yet so there isn’t as much data available as products going through a growth phase, and there’s a big focus on launching the go-to-market (GTM) plan. Since you’re building something new, it also requires an ability to rally your team around your mission and build confidence in what you’re building for the market.
Key skills: creating product vision/mission, cross-functional collaboration, setting up basic structure like a backlog, roadmap, and agile ceremonies, user interviews.
Other job titles may include: innovation PM, or most nondescript PM roles at most startups who are building something new.
2. Growth Product Manager
A growth product manager is working on a product that has already found PMF, and is therefore focused on a specific growth metric like activation, adoption, retention, expansion revenue, or referrals. This role can be different from other types of product positions in that it is extremely metrics based (although hopefully all types of PMs are using some level of data) and it’s usually tied to analyzing product marketing funnels to increase conversion rates.
Growth product managers usually do a lot of experimentation like A/B testing across specific customer segmentations to see how to increase their desired metrics. Note: in order to be able to do proper statistically significant testing, your product needs a minimum number of user volume each week before you can do A/B testing, which is why you don’t typically see this in the 0 to 1 PM role.
Key skills: A/B tests, customer segmentation, experimentation, optimization, cross-functional collaboration, channel-based skills like SEO, cross-functional collaboration, pricing, optimizing onboarding experience for users.
Other job titles may include: acquisition PM, activation PM, engagement PM, retention PM, pricing PM, subscriptions PM, conversion PM, monetization PM.
3. Platform Product Manager
Platform product managers are usually responsible for scaling multiple products on a platform. These products can be consumer or enterprise facing (depending on the company), and they’re responsible for prioritizing the work of multiple products while still creating a cohesive experience.
They’re usually thinking more about the products from a high level internal viewpoint, so they tend to be further removed from the end user and don’t always have control over what the specific roadmap looks like for the user-facing functionality of each of their products. Some common considerations include things like build vs. buy, scaling the tech stack, and maintaining security requirements to protect end-users.
Since platform product managers are usually at larger sized companies, that means they’ll also need to be skilled in navigating bureaucracy and saying ‘no’ gracefully in order to maintain focus.
Key skills: comfortable with tech stack, internal stakeholders as customers, build vs buy, scaled development, cross-functional collaboration, negotiation.
Other job titles may include: trust/security PM, identity PM, data PM, personalization PM, machine learning PM.
4. Enterprise Product Manager
Enterprise product managers build products for enterprise customers (B2B or B2B2C). You likely won’t see this role at a startup, and it typically means you’ll be working with too-big-to-turn-down customers and require lots of cross-department collaboration.
Rolling products out to customers and validating the market are usually slow in these types of roles because the customers of these enterprise products are companies with internal requirements around getting sign off from legal, risk, procurement, etc. as opposed to having a single consumer as the end customer and buyer. Example enterprise companies include Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and cloud platforms.
Key skills: understanding the distinction between user personas and buyer personas, meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders, likely scrum or SAFe agile methodologies.
Other job titles may include: ecosystem PM.
5. Consumer Product Manager
I think of consumer product managers in juxtaposition to enterprise product managers. Instead of selling to large enterprises, you’re in the hyper-competitive world of selling to individual consumers. This is probably the sexiest type of product management because consumer brands are easy to understand, usually have cool branding, and are more fun to work on than a B2B behind-the-scenes tax software. This also means it’s usually one of the most competitive types of product manager positions to obtain.
Examples of consumer products include Lyft, TikTok, Polaroid, and Bose.
Key skills: A/B testing, product marketing funnel analysis, usually focused on revenue and retention, subscription (if it’s a subscription product), ecommerce, cross-functional collaboration.
Other job titles may include: acquisition PM, activation PM, engagement PM, retention PM, pricing PM, subscriptions PM, conversion PM, monetization PM.
6. Technical Product Manager
Technical product engineers are just as they sound — technical. Sometimes they were an engineer before becoming a product manager, and other times it’s just a product manager who loves understanding the technical side of the product.
Unsurprisingly, this role is more common for products that are more developer-facing and technical in nature (as opposed to consumer facing products).
Key skills: highly variable depending on the technical product! Some popular technical areas include security, identity architecture, APIs, cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence.
Other job titles may include: trust/security PM, identity PM, data PM, personalization PM, machine learning PM.
7. Product Marketing Manager
A product marketing manager (PMM) is responsible for positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategies for existing products. They work closely with the product management team to understand the features and benefits of the product and develop a narrative that resonates with target customers. They also work with the sales and marketing teams to create and execute marketing plans to promote the product, as well as with the product management team to gather feedback from customers and use it to improve the product.
Key skills: product positioning/messaging, marketing plans, market research, product adoption, revenue-focused, pricing, market segmentation, marketing campaigns.
Other job titles may include: acquisition PM, activation PM, engagement PM, retention PM, pricing PM, subscriptions PM, conversion PM, monetization PM.
8. Product Operations Manager
Product operations is a role that focuses on supporting product managers by creating structure and streamlining processes like user interviews, quality assurance (QA) checks, running experiments, managing tools in the product stack, or analyzing data.
This is also a role I would expect to only exist at large companies, and I imagine that the relevant skillsets for this role depend a lot on the company. I haven’t met anyone in this role or even seen many job descriptions for this, so if you’re familiar with this role, comment down below so others can hear straight from you what this job is really like.
Key skills: highly variable, but likely includes process improvement, data analysis, user interviews, QA process, tool management.
Conclusion
When we lump all product roles together, we’re giving up an opportunity to deconstruct what skillsets and frameworks work and don’t work in certain types of environments.
Distinguishing between the types of product roles gives us a vocabulary and a frame of reference to increase our odds of building products that succeed in the market and finding the right product role. It’s less about creating rigid categorizations of product managers and more about recognizing the patterns of what’s most important in certain contexts.
So I ask you, what type of product manager are you? And what kind of product manager do you want to be?
