Discover Your Product-Career Fit
Updated: Oct 18, 2024
As a product professional, you aspire to achieve Product-Market-Fit to ensure your commercial success of your product. But have you wondered how to achieve a perfect Product-Career-Fit to build your own thriving product career?
Just as you would invest in building valuable features to achieve Product-Market Fit, you must scrupulously invest in building skills and mindset to excel in product career. Let's understand diverse product career spectrum and required skills to set yourself for success in your product career.
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." Steve Jobs
Spectrum of Product Management Careers
My previous blog helps you evaluate your initial fitment to the product career. Next step of achieving Product-Career-Fit is to identify the right product management career stream that aligns with your aspirations, skills, and industry. Each role below provides unique challenges, and opportunities for career advancement. While this blog outlines various product roles, we shall dive deeper into a couple of top roles providing the insights into their responsibilities and pathways. I will cover the remaining roles in the future posts.
Core Roles:
Product Owner
B2B Product Manager
B2C Product Manager
Product Analyst or Business Analyst
Product Operations Manager
Product Marketing Manager
Specialized Roles:
AI/ML Product Manager
Enterprise Product Manager
SaaS Product Manager
Data Product Manager
Platform Product Manager
Emerging Roles:
Growth Product Manager
Mobile Product Manager
IoT Product Manager
VR/AR Product Manager
Sustainability Product Manager
Industry-Specific Roles:
FinTech Product Manager
HealthTech Product Manager
EdTech Product Manager
E-commerce Product Manager
Gaming Product Manager
Generalist Product Manager
A Generalist Product Manager (Generalist PM) is the jack-of-all-trades in product world, responsible for wide range of product areas. You get to work with the teams across multiple functions, such as product development, marketing, design, customer success, sales, finance and legal.
Skills to Cultivate:
Cross-Functional Collaboration to work with various teams across the organizations.
Strategic thinking to develop product vision and align with the organizational objectives.
Market research to understand market trends and needs.
Communication skills to articulate your ideas and thoughts effectively to stakeholders.
Your Activities:
You are responsible for a range of activities from strategic planning to day to day execution.
Keeping product roadmap in healthy state
Competitive analysis
Analyzing customer problems
Working with user experience team to create mockups
Ensuring effective collaboration between design, engineering and internal customer-oriented teams such as sales and marketing.
Analyzing performance of product metrics
Whom You Collaborate with:
Engineers to communicate the product requirements
Product designers to create mockups for engineering teams as reference and rapid prototypes for getting customer feedback.
Marketing and sales teams to ensure their readiness to pitch the product.
Customer success teams to understand customer pain points, problems and feedback.
Success Metrics
Product Adoption
User Engagement
Time to Experience
Customer Satisfaction
Best Suited for:
Individuals who have the background in presales, engineering, or product design bring different skills to leverage to grow as Generalist PM. However any professional working around the product ecosystem having a strong motivation to transition into product management can become Generalist PM by building on the skills mentioned here.
Career Path:
As a Generalist PM, you can potentially move into leadership positions such as Director of Product Management. You responsibilities could expand by adding multiple products under your ownership.
Key Challenges:
Due to the collaborative nature of the role and changing business priorities, keeping track of product focus and stakeholder interests could become intensive challenge to handle.
Technical Product Manager
Your role as Technical Product Manager is to bridge the gap between business objectives and product requirements. You will closely work with technical teams to define the solution considering the constrains and standards.
Skills to Cultivate:
Technical Knowledge to understand the engineers lingo and possibly contribute to the discussion by asking right probing questions. You need to cover overall software concepts such as database, APIs. Knowledge of analytics tools such as Tableau/Power BI,
Data Analysis to de-cypher the data from various sources to draw product insights
Ability to communicate technical concepts to the non-technical audience.
Leading the technical team to help to build the products delivering the business outcomes.
Your Activities:
As a Technical PM, you have to create and own the technical requirements and specification. In some situations, you will be required to provide user scenarios in the context of Security, Performance, Scalability and Reliability of the system. This requires you not only to understand the user behavior but also system behavior and constraints.
Whom You Collaborate with:
You need to primarily collaborate with the technical teams including product engineering, implementation and DevOps teams. You will work with engineering team to build the right product that addresses your customer needs. You will need to work with implementation (also known as professional services) and DevOps teams to understand the challenges they face during the implementation, delivery and deployment process to further prioritize these items on your roadmap.
Success Metrics:
Technical Performance Metrics such as uptime, error rates, response time, page load time
Customer Complaints or Support Tickets during the implementation and live phases
Time to complete the task
Best Suited for:
Individuals with the engineering, data analysis background who is passionate about technology and solving/understanding complex technical problems excel in this role.
Career Path:
Technical PMs grow into senior roles such as Staff Technical Product Manager, or leadership position such as Director of Product Management. Technical PMs can also further grow in technical leadership positions such as Chief Technology Officer.
Key Challenges:
Balancing between technical constraints, feasibility and meeting business objectives could become major challenge. Key is to maintain the alignment between technical and non-technical stakeholders through a clear, and effective communication.
Exploring Paths to the Product Mastery
Each product role offers unique opportunities to grow in your career. I will continue to unveil additional roles across product spectrum, including specialized and industry specific roles. Please tell me - which categories would you like me to cover in my future posts?
PM Categories
Core Roles
Specialized Roles
Emerging Roles
Industry-Specific Roles
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