Finding the “Right” Product Manager

Note from the editor: Thank you to Justin Saeheng, a GS Futures venture partner, who works with our Future of Construction fund. Justin is one of the strongest product leaders we know; we are lucky to collaborate with Justin in support of our portfolio companies and the wider built environemnt ecosystem. In addition to our collaboration, Justin started the Almansor Group in 2022. The article below is a synthesis of thoughts, research, industry observations, and experiences led by Justin.

Who’s this guide for? If your startup is looking to build a PM team or is planning to hire a product manager (“PM”) and you’re concerned about PM fit as well as how will it affect your business. From an investors side, you may be evaluating how a product team is equipped to achieve velocity in the coming years. This guide will help define the ins and outs of determining the right product manager fit through the following sections:

• The 101: What does the PM do?
• What types of PMs are there? Definitions and evolutions
• What should I be looking for? Questions to understand the PM needed at your company
• Aligning with the business: Stages of the business, PM skills and PM org

The 101:

What does the product manager role encompass generally? In the past, some firms see product as “mini-CEO” and some others confused definitions between product and program manager. At a high level, product encompasses some, if not most, of the following:

• Strategy — comfort with business and product strategy, go-to-market, sometimes pricing, and tracking KPIs
• Technical — ability to converse on architecture, stack, managing engineers, types of engineers, trends, roadmaps and quality
• Analytics — understand (possibly implement) product analytics to measure customer journeys and success events
• Execution — manages product life cycle, can speak about corner cases, moves quickly to resolve issues both internally and externally
• Design — understands basic design principles and flows; for early startups, if the PM has the ability to design, this can help reduce a lot of back and forth
• Planning — coordinates with other functions well, plans ahead and drives toward roadmap with ability to control scope and say no
• Culture — works well with other teams and leadership, creates a culture aligned with the vision of the company

Note that the Product Manager doesn’t have to be skilled in every single area. These are just the qualities technical Product Managers look for and some anchor on one skill-set more than others depending on the business.

What types of PMs are there?

Before answering types of PMs, we should ask “what ways can you categorize PMs?” There’s a few ways common approaches to classifying PMs (with dozens of variations to this approach):

Classification by PM strength

In 2017, McKinsey wrote an article about the “Product Managers for the Digital World” and truth be told, this was a good starting point. The world has changed and the landscape and businesses have evolved. McKinsey started off with the perspective of classifying PMs by either:

1. Technologist — focuses on technical solutions, often from an engineering background and products are more like platforms, APIs, or complex data/engineering products (DevOps, etc.)
2. Generalist — a bit of both technical and business side to the PM role. They might have been an engineer who went to business school or an engineering degree but has really worked more on the business side in their career (analyst, strategy etc.)
3. Business — may have studied business as an undergraduate or worked in investment banking or consulting. They transitioned over into tech possibly through a few roles or within the same company transitioned from marketing into PM or sales into PM.

Source: McKinsey & Company

Classification by stage of business

This categorization examines the PM role through the lens of product delivered at different stages of business development / different business models:

Core — owning the product efforts for the primary product of the business. In this case, the product has been proven, has established product-market fit, and is generating the majority of company revenue. Well known examples include Adobe’s Photoshop or Google’s Adwords.

Stage of business: Series A plus

Innovation — focused on finding new sources of growth for the business, whether expanding into new markets, creating a new product, or more. For example, in established business, this includes growing new product lines. For early stage startups, this could include finding product-market fit.

Stage of business: Seed to Series B plus

Growth — sometimes categorized alongside product marketing but has been a new area for “growth hacking” which focuses on increasing product adoption through experimentation. This includes a PM function that has knowledge around various channels to reach more customers and very adept in experimentation such as multivariate testing, A/B testing etc.

Stage of business: Series A through Series C plus

Platform — when the company has a platform product, a platform PM interfaces with all the stakeholders (not necessarily end users) of the platform. For example, Apple’s iOS system needs to be stable and extremely well coordinated with other app product teams that are developing on top of the iOS platform.

Stage of business: at platform adoption (generally Series A plus)

Classification by type of product

Sometimes classification by product as a driver for business success is a helpful framework. As mentioned earlier, a PM function is not mutually exclusive to one type of classification, but rather it’s helpful to frame the PM objectives through multiple lenses:

Data Driven — for products that require analysis of a vast amount of data. Examples include Facebook, Paypal, and Zynga.

Engineering Driven — for products and companies that are leaning more on engineering to drive the company. Examples such as Google, Stripe, and Microsoft come to mind.

Design Driven — for products that depend on sharp design and high customer delight. These are typically consumer-facing product with examples such as Apple and Airbnb.

Sales Driven — for products that depend on large contracts, typically enterprise accounts and B2B products. Examples like Salesforce, Oracle, and Workday are easy to cite here.

Source: Product Life

So why isn’t there a single definition of classifying PMs?

Realistically, product managers can’t be boxed into a category. The need for a product manager depends on the situation. An early startup with no product market fit will need a different PM than if the business is already established. Moreover, it really is more about product manager alignment than bucketing the product manager into specific categories.

What should I be looking for?

So now that we know a few different types of PMs, what should we look for? There’s a handful of questions to ask before hiring a PM. Below are some questions that range from basic questions to deeper questions to help frame a conversation on PM fit.

Assessing Product Manager Fit

• What’s the product?
• What stage of the business are you?
• What’s the current business model? (B2B, retail, marketplace, SaaS, RaaS, API, ML, AI, Hardware, data platforms)
• What industy(ies) are we working with?
• Who are the users? Who are the decision makers?
• What’s the roadmap look like (if any)?
• What’s the objective of the business in the next year or two? (optimizing for speed or quality or something else)
• What metrics are you monitoring (if any)?
• What size of team, types of tech has the candidate worked with?
• What type of documentation do you have (if any)? (and do you need someone to document?)
• Do you need a PM or a Product Owner? (vision vs. execution and managing engineering)
• Does the PM need data platform experience?
• What type of prioritization is the PM familiar with and going to use?
• Where is the tech team based? Onshore or offshore?
• What does the testing infrastructure look like (if any)?
• How are decisions ultimately made at the company? (answering honestly — is it a “product driven company?”)
• How does the product process align with the culture?
• What are the trade offs the company and product process is willing to make relative to its stated goals and how the PM wants to execute

Aligning with the business.

Based on classification objectives and discovery through the questions above (and more), you’ll have some understanding of PM fit. Below is a simple table to help think through the stage of business, skills, business goals and product organization that a startup may look like. Again, depending on the complexity of the product and business, the organization can look a bit different, but generically this is meant to be a guideline for checking if the PM team is “a fit”:

As always, we welcome discussion on our musings; please reach out.