Who is a Product Manager — A series — Part two
PM roles vary from industry to industry and from organization to organization. But various PM roles vary across mainly 4 dimensions.
- Business Facing and High Abstraction
The PM role that lies in this quadrant is called “Growth PM” role. Growth PM role is mainly business facing and involves high abstraction w.r.t. the details/technicalities involved in a product. A Growth PM is responsible for revenue growth or business growth by focusing on a specific metric. A Growth PM focuses on all aspects of an already launched product to improve either customer retention, revenue or product market fit.
Key responsibilities of a growth PM are -
- Problem identification or understanding customer journey.
- Identification and creation of user personas.
- Story writing(Epics — Focusing on high level product features).
- Testing value propositions.
2. Engineering Facing and High Abstraction
A PM whose role is engineering facing but also at high abstraction w.r.t. the details/technicalities involved in a product usually manages a third party developer program and is termed “Technical Product Manager”. The PM in this role is responsible to look after the whole thing. The PM here will be working at high level of abstraction but would be working with probably both external and internal engineers on what is to be provided to these third party developers/stakeholders.
Key responsibilities of a PM working in this area:
- Stakeholder management
- Identification and creation of user personas.
- Story writing(Epics — Focusing on high level product features).
- Story grooming
3. Business Facing and Low Abstraction
The PM in this domain whose role is Business facing and at a low abstraction w.r.t. details/technicalities involved in the product is a Product Manager as well as a Product Owner. If a PM lies in this quadrant, the product manager could be a PM for a specialty piece of enterprise software or a specialty use of a piece of enterprise software(For eg. CRM(Customer Relationship Management)Software. The role is going to be primarily business facing , understanding this particular set of users like, let’s say, we have a piece of enterprise software that helps with financial compliance, and the PM is going to be working with business people at a low-level of abstraction.
Key responsibilities in this role are :
- Stakeholder Management
- Story writing(features), Story grooming and backlog prioritization
- UAT testing (User testing)
4. Engineering Facing and low abstraction
The PM’s in this role are generally Product Owners. If a PM lies in this quadrant, the product manager could be a PM working on a developer platform internal or external to the company, working on a specific API , a role relatively engineering facing at a low-level of abstraction. For example, A product manager for an internal security team of the organization working with other internal engineering teams.
Key responsibilities in this role are:
- Stakeholder Management
- Story writing(features), Story grooming and backlog prioritization
- UAT testing (User testing)
Apart from these roles there exits a special role — “Non Titular Product Manager”
Non Titular Product Managers
A product-focused Startup CEO or someone in a roughly equivalent position where he/she is the product management department. Its kind of like to have the particular challenge of having to constantly balance all these things and maybe not having quite as much of a backstop from other collaborators. And so they need to make decisions about where to focus and how to invest their time to scale the business up.
