Three Types of Product Managers

The product managers can be broadly classified into three types depending on the stakeholders they interact with and the product they build for.

Internal Product Manager:

1. PMs are part of the team called internal tools.
2. They build the tools for the other teams inside the company.
3. For example, an HRM tool for the HR team to support the rest of the teams or an internal job portal.
4. This is a great role for the new product managers because it has less risk involved as the tool is built for a small number of users.
5. This role involves a lot of learning as one does a lot of Project Management as well.

B2B or SAAS Product Manager

1. A type of product manager that builds products at a company whose clients are other companies.
2. Examples: Oracle, Salesforce, Freshworks etc.
3. Needs to make sure what they build meets the business requirements of the businesses that they’re selling to.
4. Interacts a lot with the sales team.
5. This role involves a smaller number of users than a B2C role.
6. PMs often have tighter deadlines.
7. Priorities are heavily weighted by the sales team and how much money a certain feature will bring in.

B2C Product Manager:

1. The most common type but the most challenging one.
2. The product is built for millions of users and usually have a product on multiple platforms.
3. Examples, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp etc.
4. This type requires a wide range of skills to be successful and as well a lot of vision and creativity. In their consumer role, product managers are always trying to maximize usage or some other metric.
5. No one is there to tell them that item X is the best thing to do next. That contrasts to the business to business product manager, for example, because the salespeople are saying “Hey, we’re going to make $5 million if we build this feature.” On the consumer side, no one can really predict exactly what is the thing that is to be built for sure.
6. The consumer PM spends a whole lot of time talking to those users, the millions of them out there, coming up with multiple different prototypes, user testing, A/B testing, and just analyzing tons of data. The bigger the user base, the more powerful the testing becomes.

There are other types of PMs out there, but these are the big three you’ve got to be familiar with.

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