Find your fit — a deep dive on different types of product roles
As I was talking to a product management coaching client recently, the topic of “what type of PM do you want to be” came up. I thought this would be a good topic to start my PM blog with, since with all of the tech layoffs en masse, many ex-PMs are not just looking for a job, but for their next chapter, that next fulfilling career in product management.
And how can you target, apply and interview for the right PM roles that could propel your career in the right direction, if you are not fully aware of all the possibilities? I want to shed some light on many of the different types of PM roles that are possible, but before that, let’s start by taking a panoramic view of product management.
Product Management is a broad discipline that applies across different types of products and industry sectors. Take a look around your room as you read this, and every product you see, from your toothbrush to your keyboard, to your ergonomic chair, has gone through some sort of a product management process.
What is Product Management?
👉 In my own words, Product management is the art and science of understanding who your customers are (jobs to be done, personalization), what their unmet needs are (user research), which problems are worth solving (prioritization), what can we build to solve those problems (product design, PRDs), how can we build it (product development), when can we launch it (release cadence/timelines), how can we monetize it (if applicable), and how do we know if it successfully met the needs of our customers (establishing and measuring clear success metrics).
And, all of this must be done while constantly collaborating with a cross-functional herd-of-cats! (Yes, I’m looking at you — Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Legal, Engineering, Architects, UX Design and many others🧐)
A humble disclaimer: These are just roles I’ve come across in my 17-year career as a tech and product leader in the U.S., however this list is by no means exhaustive, and may differ for different companies or across countries (in fact, I’m sure I’m missing some other variations of PMs, please add your thoughts in the comments below!):
10 Different types of PM roles, and what they do
1. Generalist PM
All PMs (good PMs, anyway!) need the ability to wear many hats, and play different roles throughout the product development lifecycle.
A generalist PM has the experience and expertise to not just wear many hats, but be able to switch between them quickly and easily.
They can adapt very well to lead product and engineering teams, no matter what industry sector, product domain, customer segment or technology they’re asked to tackle. They can pivot the product roadmap and launch plans quickly and smoothly as customer needs change, or industry trends shift.
A solid generalist PM is knowledgeable in the end-to-end product lifecycle, or as we in the PM world call it — “concept to launch”. They have the ability to create a clear vision and product strategy + roadmap, and they also have the ability to execute and launch.
In my view, it takes somewhere between 8–10 years to be a solid generalist PM, simply because it takes that long to develop the breadth of experience across products, PM skills, and domain and/or industry knowledge.
2. Domain-specific or Industry-specific PM
Some PMs develop expertise by working on products in a specific domain overtime — for example, you are a PM that has worked for several years on marketing technology related products (think Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Eloqua etc.). Maybe you had a prior marketing background, and then got a PM job building these products.
In the example above, we are talking about a “Martech” or “Marketing” PM, i.e. a PM who is focused on and has specific expertise in Marketing technology products.
A great domain-specific PM does not just know the products in that domain, but also understands the business processes in that domain. For example, for the Martech PM, they are typically knowledgeable about lead generation, lead engagement, qualification, content management, and other marketing activities.
Industry specific PMs may have several years of experience in one industry vertical, or a couple of related industries. For example, you’re a PM that worked in the healthcare sector before for many years, and then joined a company building products for the healthcare sector as a PM.
In today’s very competitive job market, I do think that using your domain or industry knowledge & expertise as your superpower could come in handy when applying for or interviewing for PM jobs.
Early on in your career, I encourage people to work across a few different domains and industries when possible, to build their knowledge and understand the nuances.
That said, if you have an affinity for a particular domain or industry sector, because of your education, values, or prior work experiencer, you may decide to stick to that for many years, because you love it & enjoy working in that space!
3. Technical (or very technical) PM
Technical PMs are everywhere these days — AI is going to take over our jobs, haven’t you heard ? ;) And, hello ChatGPT, I’m not scared of you, in fact, I think we’re going to be friends and you’ll need me sooner or later, to train you, test you, fix you, or clean up the mess you made 🙂
Jokes apart, technical PMs are expected to be well-versed in the specific technologies they are focused on as a PM, and will need to either act as data scientists themselves in some cases, or collaborate closely with data science teams to build products. This may require experience in machine learning, NLP (natural language processing), AI and other emerging fields.
If you are transitioning from a less technical role to a more technical PM role, use your generalist PM skills as your strengths, while demonstrating pro bono/volunteer work on the relevant technologies, any side gigs or consulting work related to these, any training or certifications you’ve taken (as long as they are from a known, legit institute), or even if you worked on building neural network based models as part of your University coursework or research like I did during my Masters in Electrical Engineering, brush up that old knowledge and make it count!
The number of technical PMs is going to continue to grow in every domain and industry sector, so I do recommend starting to learn about this on the side, even though you might be in a cushy, ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan)-stocked situation as a non-technical PM at the moment. Those emerging technology skills will come in very handy as this field rapidly transforms over the next 10 years.
4. Inbound PM
An inbound or internal facing PM typically manages the product strategy, vision, roadmap, design and development of an internal facing product — it could be an internal marketing software, an internal CRM system, an internal employee success portal, and so on.
Inbound PMs are great at collaborating successfully in a matrixed organization with cross-functional stakeholders, i.e. getting people internally to agree on what problems are most important to solve for, and driving consensus from conflicting interests.
They have a similar role as external PMs, however the role can often be quite challenging, simply because internal stakeholders have a lot more close access to the PM and can demand more features, and push for delivery faster.
It is very hard as an external PM to communicate to all external customers about a delayed launch, but it is no easier telling your VP of sales that your launch is delayed by 2 weeks and she will need to change plans for their entire sales team.
The benefits of working as an inbound PM are that salaries are equivalent to outbound PMs, the work is often technical and challenging/stimulating, you learn skills that very much overlap with outbound PMs, without the added stress of dealing with external customers. If you are more of an introvert personally, and presenting quarterly demos to 1000s of customers is not your thing, you might just enjoy this.
5. Outbound PM
An outbound or external facing PM essentially builds products mainly for external customers — let’s say you are a Senior or Principal PM that owns/manages the customer experience product portfolio for AirBnB, or you are a PM for Google Maps, or a PM at Saleforce working on the Service Cloud product, these are all examples of outbound PMs.
Outbound PMs need to know how to engage with external customers, and gather feedback from them. They need to be comfortable doing external customer product demos, conducting user research, or giving talks at conferences with new product launches in front of 1000s of customers.
They also often work with internal teams such as content, marketing or product marketing teams to plan the external customer launch. They may write a blog post about the new product features, create a post in the customer community portal, or think about product price, and positioning in the market.
They still need to think about product adoption by external customers, but they are generally held less responsible for it than internal facing PMs.
You could be a generalist, a domain expert or an industry expert, and overlap that with being an outbound PM. For example, I have experience in web & marketing technology and products (domain knowledge), and I’m also a generalist PM with both inbound and outbound experiences.
6. Inbound + Outbound
Sometimes you maybe asked to work on managing a portfolio of products that is a mix of inbound and outbound products, and this can be quite interesting and fulfilling, since you get to build a larger, broader set of “product muscles”, rather than be silo-ed in one and wondering what it is like on the other side!
7. B2B PM
B2B (business to business) product managers or ‘Enterprise’ PMs are adept at designing and building products for enterprise customers. Meaning, these PMs build products for companies to run their businesses on.
You could think about an ITSM (IT Service Management) product that is used by a company’s IT department, or a CRM (customer relationship management) system used by Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. Funny enough I have worked for some of the most successful companies in both ITSM and CRM, i.e. ServiceNow, and Salesforce respectively :)
B2B PMs do need to be mindful of various things and face numerous challenges — just to name a few:
- Access to customers and getting customer feedback is not direct nor easy — it needs planning, budget and efforts
- You need to make both your customers and your end users happy, and they are often different, with different needs
- Product pricing and packaging becomes quite important to stay competitive, because costs of B2B products can be quite high, and pricing models have traditionally been complex (or shall I say, hmm, intentionally confusing 😉)
Being a B2B PM can be very rewarding in my experience, because of the broad and strategic impact you can deliver at scale, for a very large customer base (thousands, or even millions!), and sometimes your work can shape an entire industry (think of the first cloud based product in the 90s and the PMs that worked on that!).
If you’re curious to learn more about what it’s like to be a B2B or Enterprise PM, you can check out my talk on enterprise products here (I created this (personal content) for Product School in 2021, presented via Linkedin).
8. B2C PM
B2C (Business to consumer) PMs build products for direct customers to use and delight in — for example, that PM who works on the Lyft or Uber search and match experience. B2C PMs have to deal with several challenges as well, however I do think that B2C PMs face less complexity in some areas of product management, compared to the messy, not-so-simple world of B2B products.
Key differences that a B2C PM has to consider (compared to a B2B PM):
- The buying cycle is usually shorter and less complex
- Customers typically = end users
- Switching users from another product to yours is easier in B2C than B2B, where moving from one product to another may need a significant investment and leadership buy-in
If you love working on end user products more directly, and where you can have a closer connection to your customers, see and measure the impact of your products on customers more easily, you will likely enjoy being a B2C PM.
9. Growth PM
In many smaller technology product companies, including many silicon valley startups, there is increasingly a role called “Growth PM”, whose role is essentially to “grow” the product portfolio and reach a broader set of customers.
In my view, it should be any product manager’s goal to “grow” their product — meaning, expand their customer base, evaluate their target market and customer needs, and come up with strategies to “grow” their product (for example, expand to international markets, or capture customers in another segment). So I have a skeptical outlook at this emerging trend of hiring “growth PMs”, because I think every great PM should inherently be a “growth PM” (if your product does not grow, it essentially dies, and then what will you as a PM do?).
However it is important to keep this in mind if ‘product growth & scaling’ is something you have expertise in, and you want to market yourself as a “Growth PM”. For example, you are good at growing a brand new product and company from a seed stage to your first 100 customers. Or your sweet spot might be to help companies in the later stages of product growth — say scale from that first 100 to a 1000 or 10,000 customers or more.
This PM does not typically own and manage a specific product, rather, their job is to collaborate cross-functionally with other PM and come up with a holistic vision and strategy to ‘grow’ the company’s product portfolio.
10. Adoption PM
This is another emerging PM role that deserves a mention — this PM is responsible for customers to “adopt”, i.e. consistently use their product. This may be sometimes branded as a “Customer Success PM”, or something similar.
This role often exists in very large companies where it is important to have the right enablement and training toolkits for customers to easily use the products they purchased. Some smaller public companies or close-to-IPO startups also hire adoption PMs.
When some products and their customer bases grow very large, and adoption or usage challenges seem to emerge, companies may hire an ‘adoption PM’, and even staff a team of PMs, led by a PM director, to improve the product adoption (any of my Salesforce friends reading this thinking of SF Lightning adoption challenges 😉 ).
Adoption PMs may work on creating content (blogs, community posts) to help customers better use the products they purchased, they deliver live training and webinars close to product launch, and help PMs on different aspects of product adoption.
Summary: No matter what type of PM you choose to become (or accidentally end up becoming!), hope this information helps you become aware of other possibilities, so you can easily switch and transition and grow into different roles, learn new skills and soar in your product career!
