I was having a performance review session with one of my product managers who recently made the switch from product design to product management and the conversation dovetailed into a very valuable lecture. I was trying to show him a path to growth and how we can become better at his job and in doing that, I used an analogy to describe the various types of product managers and I think this would be valuable to everyone else. It’s short and straight to the point. Here you go.
There are three kinds of Product Managers –
- Those with a technical background – started as software engineers and then got tired of writing lines of code and became product managers to give them a holistic view of the products they build. They go into the role adept at understanding the system architecture of the products they oversee and their technical background comes to the fore when designing the linkages and backend services to power their products. They are deficient in seeing the product from the lens of the customer or the business and rather geek out on things that seem nice but may not necessarily move the market.
- Those with a design background – started as product designers and UI/UX folks and then made the switch to product management. They come armed with customer expectations and design, they want their products to be visually appealing even if feature deficient. They will clash with engineering because they don’t seem to understand why Engineering cannot build a flywheel that changes the icon colours, they spend their time doing usability research and customer surveys and less time with engineering.
- Those with a business background – started out as business analysts or project managers and then made the switch to technology. They understand the business very well and only build products they are convinced will impact the company’s top and bottom lines, They don’t care about features or design, they want to launch products out there and book revenue. These folks will frustrate design and engineering because they don’t understand how it works and just want to release products. They don’t care about sprints, scrum, agile or any of those things, they just want to release products and announce good things during monthly management meetings.
None of these three distinct categories make the best product managers. The ideal product manager is someone that is able to merge these three categories and their uniqueness into one (the fourth category). The best product manager should have a basic understanding of how engineering works, should have an eye for design and customer needs and also be mindful of the business and the impact of what they build on the business. In more than a decade of work, I have come across products built by product managers in each of the three distinct categories and very few products built by product managers in the fourth category (a merger of all three).
Miracle Roch.