The 99 Types of Product Managers – Info Entrepreneurship

Or trying to define the job of a Product Manager…

As the tech industry is booming in France, the job of Product Manager is in the spotlight. Indeed PMs occupy a central position in the development of the product. But many startups that hire their first PM are wondering which missions to write in their job description. After 4 years in the product world, I realize that there is no unique model of “product manager”.

From…

• prioritizing tasks in an agile environment (product owner), to…
• crafting CEO-level product strategy, to…
• being responsible for the UX design of your app…

… each company has their own definition of the role.

In small startups, Product Managers have a super wide scope. For instance, they’re often required to craft the UX of their product, or run some commands/queries on the terminal.

Here’s an overview of every single mission a product manager can be assigned to.

Depending on the number of tasks a PM can absorb, this makes many combinations… From 15,504 with 5 or 15 tasks, to 184,756 with 10 tasks.

Hence we can probably find tens of thousands of definitions of the Product Manager job ????

However, this reasoning reaches its limits when you look at scale-ups who have been growing their product team. In large product teams with specialized roles — for instance product designers, UX researchers, data analysts — the PM has a more narrow scope.

Toward a standardization of the PM role in scale-ups and big companies ????

Typically at BlaBlaCar — where I worked 2.5 years as a PM — the tasks described above were split among many other roles:

In this situation, the scope of the product manager becomes narrower and narrower.

More extremely, in the largest tech companies there are other roles that absorb further the scope of the product manager:

• Product Marketing Managers take care of benchmarking other products.
• In big companies like Uber and Airbnb, Product Operations Managers/Specialists help Product Managers craft their product roadmaps and product strategies, by providing them with the right tools and by aligning large groups of stakeholders.
• In some companies (like at PayPal where I was a Product Intern for 6 months) Product Launch Managers help Product Managers take care of the “feature launch” and “rollout” part, from beta testing to 100% of the users.

Hence Product Managers are refocusing on the most strategic streams of their role:

• Defining the product roadmap, along with engineering managers.
• Understanding business goals. In large companies, there is a sh*t ton of information (data, user feedback) to process and dozens of stakeholders to manage. This can become a full-time job and that’s why product operations managers are helpful in large corporations.
• Defining the product vision = how do I see my product evolving in the next 5 years?
• Defining the product strategy = how do I go there?

➡️ Those last two can seem like “bullshit” missions but in big companies with several products and hundreds of product people, it’s super important to have a product vision that’s consistent with other teams and compelling; that anyone in the company can identify themselves to.