The Earth, Water, Fire, and Air Product Manager Persona

Not all product managers are the same. Everyone has a different combination of skills and styles that they use to get the job done. Nevertheless, I see product managers fit into four categories. In this article, I put personas behind each — the earth, water, fire, air PMs.

4 pillars of PM

Before we jump in to discuss the distinct categories, there are 4 core baseline competencies that are common across all PMs. The uniqueness of any one PM comes from the proportion of these skills.

Design intuition— ability to make judgement calls on how to solve a problem creatively

Technical knowledge — ability to talk shop with developers and programmers

Analytical ability— ability to look into the numbers in order to draw insights that shape the direction the product strategy

Project management — ability to manage stakeholders and resources to deliver certain features & enhancements on time and at cost

Personas — The 4 elements of nature

Product managers and designers love to use personas to categorize different customer groups. How about let’s switch that around and put personas to categorize the different types of product manager who have varying styles and skills. I decided to use the 4 elements of nature as a theme.

Earth

These product managers have the sharpest technical skills.

They are able to talk the talk with developers, write unit tests that satisfy the user stories, and troubleshoot the code to give their team a head start when the tickets are ready.

The Earth PM will be perfect for your team with infrastructure projects and back-end heavy work.

Water

Water as an element has an incredible ability to adapt. It form to the shape of whichever container you put it in. If you pour it into a tea cup, it forms to the shape of that tea cup. If you pour it into a beer mug, it becomes the shape of that mug. In addition, it can cut through diamonds if it is put into the right conditions.

As a water PM, he or she is extremely analytical and growth focused. Putting limited weight on their own intuition, they would rather quickly iterate and run tests to validate assumptions with user actions. Once the data is collected, they have the ability to create stories and extract nuggets of truth out of the data to drive product decisions.

When you have a consumer facing product with a baseline level of users, leverage a water PM to turbo charge your team in order to drive growth. They will be able to help your product adapt in order to meet the goals.

Fire

Fire as an element has a polarizing reputation. People often tie it to the characteristics of passion and determination, while others see it as destructive and irrational. Nevertheless, I hope you don’t carry your own biases into the characterization of fire PMs.

They are hyper-focused on delivery and will do everything it takes to ship on time and within budget. They have excellent project management skills to align the various interests of stakeholder and drive progress on the project. Fire PMs are particularly great if you have a B2B product where managing partnerships and expectations are critical.

Air

Lightest of the four elements, air has a special “airiness”. Carrying this analogy forward to the PM world, air PMs thrive in conditions that are not weighed down by existing user groups and perceptions. They are great designers and can ask the right questions to solve the problem at hand.

If your team needs an innovation injection to look at a problem in a new way, an air PM would best meet your need.

Over to you

I’m sure not every PM fits neatly into this framework. But if you are a PM, which one are you closest to?

If you are an organization, which PM persona does your team need?