On the Spectrum: What Kind of Product Manager Are You?
I know you’re guilty of pausing for a little while, and thinking, “What kind of product manager am I really?”
“I haven’t gotten a product management role yet, so you will be seeing more articles from me in the near future. Breaking into Product management is not easy but I will keep up the good work. Cheers to my fellow techies trying to break into product management, I see you and I wish you the best of luck. Don’t stop advocating for yourself.”
Regards,
Ochade
If this is you — you are among the 50% of product managers (PM) I spoke to that did ask themselves this question.
Another 30% were intrigued by the question, and without pausing to think about it, went to read the whole article.
Another 18% aren’t product managers but were intrigued and in pursuit of knowledge and the remaining 2% know exactly what this article entails but will learn something new.
If you’ve been following my writing, this article, like the rest is inspired by a course I took a while back on Coursera, “Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals”.
As per the course, product management is viewed on a spectrum. You will learn the level at which you interact with your team, and it could help you to decide if a product management career is where you want to be.
The course aids your introspection process and whether you’re productive as a high abstraction PM or low abstraction PM. It also helps you focus on what’s necessary.
High abstraction and low abstraction
Just think of it like this, in programming there is something called high level and low level language. High abstraction language hides all the intricacies and complexities (machine code) from the users while low level languages is very close to writing machine instructions.
This is the same with product management. You’re either working at a high abstraction or low abstraction. The below image as presented by Alex Cowan in this course visually guides our thinking in how the different terms should be viewed.
Engineering facing
According to Alex Cowan Engineering facing can be explained as thus: Are you in there working with the team everyday on the details of the implementation in which case you’re also probably acting in that product owner role.
By the way, a group named “Ethiosys” did some research and observed that when a PM is also the product owner (PO) the workload goes up by 40%.
Business facing
Are you working on setting the direction and looking at the larger picture of how the business is operating? Then you are a business facing PM. A growth PM is an example of a business facing PM. The overall role is being responsible for growth, revenue growth, user growth across a particular product or market. You monitor how the product is used and how it’s sold.
The major difference between a high abstraction PM and a low abstraction PM solely depends on the rate at which you interact with your team and product. Are you involved in all the tiny details that determines the success of your product?, If that's you, then you are working at a high abstraction.
To make things clearer, I curated a product management personality test with the aid of my friend Chinatu. Know what spectrum you’re in by tapping on this link and taking the test pmquiz.netlify.app . If you want to be cool, you can share your results on LinkedIn and tag me.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
