What You Do Is Who You Are: The Four Types of Product Managers
For a few years now, I’ve been using a question in interviews with product managers where I ask the candidate to select one of the four types of product manager.
The product manager types I say are the empath, the visionary, the builder, and the data driven.
In the three years of asking this question, I have noticed a disturbing trend, and I want to share it with you.
The Empath PM
About 60% of interviewees cite The Empath as their product manager profile. For the most part, people who are drawn to product management enjoy relating to others. It’s super valuable — getting in front of an angry user, or stoking enthusiasm in a conference talk, or feeling the pain of someone troubleshooting, that takes courage and skill.
People who are good at empathy often get ahead in their careers because they are easy to work for and easy to forge relationships with. They have high EQ and are great communicators.
Empathy is a valuable skill in another way, which is at its most simplistic, we prioritize product features based on the urgency and importance, their impact — measured by the amount of pain or joy a feature could bring. So having empathy often means being able to better prioritize product features, because Empaths understand and listen to users.
The Data Driven PM
On the opposite side of the spectrum is the Data Driven PM— the other 40% of people I’ve interviewed. These folks don’t want to talk to users, in fact they pride themselves on not doing that. They think talking to users would skew their opinion and erode objectivity.
They look at a spreadsheet or an amplitude report and know that Segment A spends X, the TAM is 1 million people, and the feature the users lack is Abc, so build Abc. Or the NPS for this feature is the worst, let’s prioritize that one.
Powerhouse PMs with data skills can cobble together metric upon metric, and are able to see meaningful insights amidst noise. It’s sort of inspiring, and very valuable. It’s also a teachable skill. So it’s not surprising that there are many product managers who think of themselves as a Data Driven PM or aspire to be one.
You’ll notice that 60+40 = 100, and we’re only through two types of product manager.
The Builder PM
Zero percent of interviewees say they are builders. Surprising, because people with solid nuts and bolts knowledge of how to DO product management will out-execute the idea people every day of the week.
You can take a new grad, give them a RICE framework, and they will make some solid product prioritization decisions. Maybe no one wants to self-identify as the builder, because the logic of simply following a framework and defined process to ‘get the job done’ sounds sort of boring?
Tangent: I Don’t Know You, But Neither Do You
I pick this answer apart in my follow up questions by asking some very targeted things, like:
- How many customers have you talked to this year? Do you read support cases or user forums?
- How often do you consult market surveys?
- Could you tell me right now the propensity to pay, retention rate, or number of registrations your product had last week? How many active users do you have? how profitable is your product?
They might say they are a data PM, but if they can’t tell me anything in #3, they’re lying to themselves and to me. If they say they are an empath but don’t talk to customers — it’s the same.
Meanwhile, if they’ve read the Lean Startup, have a certification, spend their days tagging JIRA tickets, painstakingly created a product roadmap based on user votes without talking to anyone, and have a spreadsheet with RICE columns per JIRA ticket… they’re a plain-Jane-boring-old-builder. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It might interest you to know that out of all the people who never picked this option, I’d guess 1/4 of product managers are actually a builder. Not data driven, not particularly empathetic, but solidly following prescribed steps to do their jobs.
The Visionary PM
Sharp eyed readers will notice I said there are four types of product managers and so far I’ve only talked about three. There have also been exactly 0 cases of a person saying they are a Visionary PM. 0! Absolutely not even one!
I think we can understand why no one says they are a builder, but the lack of Visionaries surprises me. Because imagining a grand future, or clearly seeing a revolution in a market — that’s exciting. That’s powerful. That’s immediate, tangible value.
Having at least one of visionary in your product team seems like a no-brainer because if nothing else, this is the person who would come up with our future hundred million dollar business.
How could there be none of these? What gives?
I could rationalize this by saying, I just don’t interview the right people, but that seems too easy. What I have observed is that there is a lack of resources for product managers about the importance of vision or more important how to create one.
We train product managers on empathy, on data analysis, on Agile, Scrum, JIRA, Notion, Wiki and frameworks — builder skills, countless blog posts, and conferences, and books — but there’s nearly nothing about developing vision or market awareness, or cultivating creativity as a product manager.
Right now the top product management books are about Building, Building, Building, NOT building by having Empathy instead, Building, Empathy… see what I mean?
And when I think about myself, and I mean really think about it — when was the last time I tried to “blue ocean strategy” and come up with a completely new product?
Am I almost always advocating for technical debt and incremental improvement? What a sobering thought.
But I Need all Four PMs
As a product leader, I’m a huge proponent of the idea of team alchemy. We need all kinds of people. We need all kinds of product managers to form a successful whole.
I train and coach my teams to operate as a collective, because no one is good at everything. So you can see why I’m on the lookout for people who are a Visionary PM or a Builder PM.
I also believe in the wonderful complexity of the individual. People should be multi-faceted. Since we value all four skills, we need to learn all four skills, and we need to employ and use all four skills.
Then, and only then, will we truly know which skillset is our strongest, or which to wield and when. I have zero interest in hammers, because to a hammer, everything is a nail.
My advice to you…
Embrace the idea of all four types of product manager.
- Find the visionary within yourself and cultivate your creativity.
- Be proud of your builder skills and own them, because they are just as important as empathy and being data informed — more so, even, despite being unglamorous.
- Take a class on data analysis and learn Excel skills instead of outsourcing it.
- Use your own product and notice where you feel confused or annoyed. Talk to your users.
Be self aware. When it comes down to what type of product manager you are, although we can be all of them, and we value all of them, and we practice and learn in each area… we probably don’t enjoy them equally.
What you do is who you are — and you may not even want to be a data driven. You may avoid numbers like a plague. That’s ok.
Maybe there’s someone out there on the hunt for a builder or a visionary, and you’re exactly the person they want for their team.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
