The 4 types of Product Manager you should know
In his book “ High Growth Handbook “, Elad Gil (entrepreneur and investor with passages through Twitter, Google and other big companies in the technology sector) lists 4 facets of the Product professional. We decided to make a mix between free translation and reflection on the topic, so you can draw your own conclusions from which you most identify.
The Business Product Manager
These types of PM are excellent at synthesizing customer requests on a killer roadmap. Business PMs tend to thrive in software companies, or businesses that demand direct interaction with users. They know how to work well with sales and present themselves well to customers, yet have enough technical knowledge to work with engineers and designers, negotiating roadmap vs development team effort. They are great at setting prices, segmentation and customer requests.
The Technical Product Manager
Technical PMs are — most of the time — professionals with such a technical background that they see it easy to work with developers in areas such as infra, search quality, machine learning, and other more technical areas. This type of PM is able to work on a very broad spectrum of Products, as long as it has the necessary business skills and good use of intuition to define the best trade-offs within the Product.
The Product Manager designer
While designers are generally super talented in user experience and visual design, they may not have enough experience in the trade-offs needed to run the business, or they may want the Product to be perfect at the “pixel level” (we can’t forget the phrase Voltaire’s “the great is the enemy of the good”). But even so, many companies are betting on the UX Designer to lead Product teams, due to their sensitivity to user interaction and also abstraction power. According to Elad Gil, the PM designer may end up dedicating too much time to the technology and design teams and not focusing so much on the business side of the Product.
The Product Manager of growth
These PMs tend to be quantitative, analytical, number-driven and in most cases highly creative and aggressive. The focus of the growth PM is to determine the critical levers that will generate adoption and use of the Product. This type of PM usually works very close to the development, marketing, UX teams and in some cases, closing partnerships so that they can also leverage the Product.
Is that you? Among the options above, which one do you believe to fit in and which subject would you like to improve?
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