How to succeed as a business-oriented product manager?

Philippe Larroque
Nov 8 · 6 min read
Crafting your career development as a product maanger
Crafting your career development as a product maanger

Let’s start with a story:

I started to work in 2014, freshly graduated from a business school in Paris, as a sales executive for a young startup.

In 2016 I became a “product manager” as I owned the product knowledge and the startup business evolution asked me to do so.

I was excited to become PM even though I had little knowledge when started. After a few product success and learnings, I left the company in 2018, I was thrilled and excited to test myself. How full of truth was the discovery!

Let’s put it this way: I discovered the product management standards when I left because I went to talk, exchange, and meet up with product people.

Confront myself to other product managers was the best decision I could take to improve my profile. I found out a lot about the job and the community’s variety. Then I learned how PMs with engineering background think and how PMs with business background approach the job.

As a consequence I wondered the following:

1- Looking at my own experience, what does it mean to be a product manager with a business background?

2- What are the differences with a PM with an engineering background?

3- What is important to focus on when kicking off the job in a tech company?

Being a PM with a business orientation, what does it imply?

Let’s try to define what it means to be a business-oriented product manager: in general, you have solid experience in business skills such as sales, marketing or customer relationship management.

Most PMs with business background previously worked as sales or marketing executives or customer success managers which means that they have experience interacting with prospects and clients.

Sales experience helps you map the clients’ needs regarding your product, marketing experience gives you a push to define closely your personas and behavior aspects of your users.

As a customer success manager, you develop a strong empathy for your clients and you connect emotionally to their interactions with your product but most importantly: you acquire important feedback about what your product is lacking: when you get (too) many phone calls with fed-up clients as I did, you understand faster your product issues!

Surely, each product manager experience is personal and the path to becoming an expert in the product field might be different from one person to another, especially in the business field.

In the end, if you are a product manager that did have one experience in the business field: what are your strengths?

1st: You are likely very customer-centric and as a consequence will be more expert on usability.

2nd: You have likely developed a strong ability (frameworks, tools or abilities) to organize, collect and analyze feedback from your users.


So why PMs with a business background can struggle a bit when kicking the job? In my personal experience and as a result of numerous discussions between PM colleagues, it comes from a difference in mindset:

  • Business-oriented PMs focus more on usability and user pain-points, that are usually visible.
  • Engineer-oriented PMs focus more on technical compatibility and finding patterns, that are usually non-visible.

How is it different from a PM with engineering orientation?

We note 3 differences: finding patterns, knowledge to challenge the tech team and scientific use of the data.

Let’s dive into it, what’s the mindset of an engineer-oriented product manager? Engineers analyze situations with the goal to find similarities, situations that look alike that could create a model of a problem. This approach is very useful to find patterns in every product situation: user’s pain-points, technical incompatibility, or technical legacy of a product. As a consequence, business PMs can sometimes only ice the top of the iceberg whereas engineer PMs already look at the bottom of it.

In addition to having a more tech approach to product development, the tech-oriented will challenge with more ease the tech team and their deliverables. Depending on your technical knowledge about the stack and the framework, you understand quicker the technical concepts and can discuss the expectations and the deliverables with more impact. As a consequence, start your PM career with good knowledge about what is a tech-stack and how does it impact a product development (limitations, legacy…) is a perk for engineer-oriented PMs. (knowledge of tech complexity)

Coming back to the mindset, it happened a few times to me to install data tools to capture what our product and clients would tell us to confirm my first assumptions. After experiencing the data research with engineer-oriented PMs, engineers first dig into the multiple sources of data with no assumptions to read what are the trends and after factorize the collected information. Business PMs have the tendency to follow “guts” feelings using the data whereas engineer PMs first put things into perspective with figures.

So if you are a product manager that did have one experience in the engineering field: what are your strengths?

1st: You are likely very data-centric and as a consequence will be more expert on analyzing your whole product scope: tech abilities, data available, patterns...

2nd: You have notable experience in technical topics which can help you to build an efficient work relationship with developers.

All PMs face similar challenges, what will make the difference between the two types of PMs mentioned here is the route they take to achieve the deliverables. As the business-oriented PM is less tech knowledgeable than the engineering-oriented PM, he will need to take more time to ask more questions to the tech team, mapping out all the concepts of the tech stack and how important they connect to his product roadmap.

If you are a business-oriented product manager, what should you focus on when landing a tech company?

What are your strengths and what should you focus on when landing a job at a tech company?

  • The first thing would be to capitalize on your business strengths: communication and customer analysis. One of the major roles of the product manager is to be an antenna that shares information and knowledge between all the stakeholders taking part in the product. That role is fundamental to succeed your product north star, having already experienced challenges and difficulties to exchange efficiently information to third parties as prospects, partners, clients or even shareholders will surely help you to succeed in that communicator role as a product manager.
  • The second thing is asking questions as often and as soon as one pops into your mind. If you don’t know something, it’s normal. But you should be driven by the idea of learning as much as possible and that means running around to different stakeholders and grabbing information piece by piece. Some on-boarding in tech companies may be difficult and the product knowledge can be split into different departments or people, your first obsession will be to dig everywhere to gather tech knowledge.
  • Lastly, resources are widely available to improve your tech knowledge. Your goal won’t be to convert yourself instantaneously into an experienced engineer product manager but to quickly identify the tech concepts that you need to acquire the ownership you want in your role as a product manager. Looking at your product stack, you will dig into the product and understand the architecture and tech functioning of your product: be inspired to think like an engineer! After acquiring such knowledge, you will feel more confident in your abilities to exchange and challenge your tech team. Remember that developers want you to respect their work and perimeter, business PMs can use that to their advantage whereas some engineer PMs can be tempted to dig into the tech work.

Curiosity is the most important quality for a PM, everyone will be willing to take a few minutes to explain a concept that they know well and that you want to discover. You also can always look for external resources such as online classes, communities or friends that can share time with you to enlarge your tech scope to nail your product architecture.

Nota bene: This post express my personal view built with my own product experience, I did exaggerate a bit the differences to make a point.

Each product path is different, not linear but all of them are engaging.

Tech or business-oriented product managers, what are your thoughts?

Warm thanks to all the product friends that helped me with feedbacks.


As a complementary resource on this post, find attached the Video on “How to succeed as a Non-Technical PM by Spotify’s Product Owner” by Jori Bell. Jori is a live example of what this post demonstration, feel free to consult her video.

Philippe Larroque

Written by

Product Manager & Product Marketer 🔎Experienced with fast-growing startups 🌱🌳 🔎Productivity maniac & design enthusiast

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