What are the different types of product managers, and how do you figure out which type you're the best fit for?

There are different ways you can think about it, but I like to think about PMs as those that build new products (0-->1) and PMs that come in to manage an existing product (1-->N).

• 0-->1: Product Managers who build a new product or service from scratch often need to innovate, which means building something that no one else has built before. 
• 1-->N: Joining a company to own an existing product, also means that product-market fit has been already established. As a PM you will focus on scaling to new or more users.

I'm planning to release a new video on this topic in a few weeks, so stay tuned. Here is a link to the channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAz_arwNkiPobhi09VrMFg

Some key types I have encountered are:

1. UX/UI product managers: These product managers are responsible for the user experience and user interface of a product. 
2. Platform product managers: These product managers focus on building and managing platforms that enable other products or services to be built on top of them.
3. Growth product managers: These product managers focus on driving growth and increasing user acquisition, retention, and engagement. 
4. Technical product managers: managing the development of complex technical products. They work closely with engineers and designers to ensure that the product is technically feasible and meets the needs of the target audience.

As for each type, the skillsets vary broadly. For UI/UX having a good understanding of customer issues and be able to ensure a UI can tackle these challenges are key. Metrics are more end user engagement related.

For Platform PM's, building a scalable and reliable platform is key. These are more technical in nature and may/may not directly interface with customer needs but indirectly via the products they support.

For Growth PM's, a solid metrics and funnel background is key along with UI/UX.

For Tech product managers, good understanding of technical systems, their interplay and abillity to collaborate with engineering is key.

For all PM's, prioritization, goal/OKR setting, communication, leadership and strategic thinking are a must.

Just like there are a million ways to segment the market, there are also a million ways to segment PMs. :-) Here are a couple of ways I like to think about PM segmentation:

• B2B versus B2C. This is probably the most obvious. In B2B, there is a smaller pool of customers, so you truly get to know them and build long-term relationships with individuals at those customers. The drawback is that you're always fighting against the "whales" (folks paying you a lot of money) skewing your roadmap in their favor rather than what you want to do as a PM which is to build for a market. In B2C, you need to be much more data-oriented, since a minor change can impact millions or even billions of users and materially move the needle. The downside is that the job can be very impersonal, particularly for a mature B2C product, as you're spending a lot of time trying to optimize for a 0.01% gain.

• Domain-specific versus domain-independent. There are PM roles that require deep technical knowledge in a domain, and there are those that don't. An example of the latter (and maybe these folks are going to hate me for saying this) is growth. The skills of a growth PM can be easily transferable between domains, as they are essentially about creating great onboarding and upsell journeys in-product, and the tactics are often very similar no matter what the type of product is. The downside is that growth is frequently one step removed from the actual customer problems i.e. JTBD that a customer is hiring the product for in the first place -- some other PM works on that.

• External versus internal, or another way of saying revenue-facing versus not. I used to say this was customer-facing or not, but this is inaccurate because every PM has a customer. The distinction is whether that customer is external (paying your company money) or internal (some other constituent inside your organization). An internal PM would be someone who works on, say, data systems or billing systems. These jobs can be very secure and valued, but there can be limited growth prospects because the level of ambiguity is very low. One other way of saying this is whether you work for a profit center or a cost center.

To the second part of the question -- there's often no way to know a priori when you're starting out in PM what you are going to like or not like. You likely have intuition (a hypothesis) of your preferences but you don't know until you get there. The best thing you can do is apply good PM skills to your own career: stay curious, ask yourself the "five whys" of why you do or don't like something in your job, don't stick around too long if you're not growing or you truly are hating something, and challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone and try something that scares you.

Different types of PMs - Core Product Managers, Platform Product Managers, Infra/Internal Product Managers, Data Product Managers, Growth Product Managers, AI Product Managers

Core Product Management

• Building products, features, enhancements directly for the company’s external target consumer/business

Platform Product Management

• Building products, tooling, systems that are leveraged/shared by a handful of core product management teams to prevent service duplication - ie billing systems, authentication services, localization/globalization/accessibility tooling, design systems, graph services, etc..

Infra/Internal Product Management

• Building products, tooling, frameworks, processes to accelerate the productivity of internal stakeholders in the company (developers, designers, GTM, marketing, analysts, etc..)

Data Product Management

• Like infra/internal product management but building warehouses, ETL, clean datasets, databases, query tooling, visualization software, to empower the productivity of data scientists, data analysts, ML engineers, etc..

Growth Product Management

• Defining and executing on flywheels, acquisition levers, engagement/retention incentives, new feature introduction mechanisms, etc.. to ultimately acquire more customers, ensure they use the right products, and win them over as life-long champions of the product.

AI Product Management

• Leverage open source or commercial software, input customer/product data into it, tune/tailor it to your business, build an custom interface on top of it, to ultimately generate recommendations and/or outputs that empowers your customers to meet their goals

• And/or build in-house, proprietary machine learning algorithms to accomplish the same as above

Oftentimes, the titles above to match what the company decides to call you - which is just Product Manager :)

Some PMs are also expected wear multiple hats here.

A super common question! Traditionally the term "product manager" can often mean different things depending on the size of the company, the product's stage, and sometimes the overall market segment. I often times bucket them into these core groups:

1. Technical Product Managers (TPM):
   These PMs work closely with engineering teams on more technical products, thinks like API driven products where the end "customer" is technical in nature. For these roles, you will need a deeper level of technical expertise and the ability to understand the technical aspects of your customers needs.

2. B2C (Business to Consumer) Product Managers:
   In a consumer-facing environment—like mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, media consumption products — I find that PMs often emphasize UX and product design (along with core PM responsibilities). One of the key areas that this group focuses on is leveraging a typically broader/larger customer base to do things like A/B testing, and quick iteration on product designs to validate assumptions and feature value.

3. B2B (Business to Business) Enterprise Product Managers:
   These enterprise PMs focus on delivering products that solve businesses' complex problems. I spent a lot of my career here and this type of PM spends a lot of time on sales enablement, strategic account engagement, and roadmap management. Given that most B2B solutions have a longer sales cycle, their relationship with sales is key to success. Depending on the size of the organization, this type of PM also focuses a lot on the financial side of the product.

4. Infrastructure Product Managers:
   These PMs (sometimes internally facing only) focus on building components that other teams and products rely on, oftentimes within an organization. For them, the GTM isn't as relevant but they need to understand and balance things like scale, interoperability, and business alignment.

Figuring Out Your Best Fit:

1. What are your Interests:
   Consider things like Do you enjoy getting into the weeds on technical discussions? Do you more get energized by user research and design? Do you geek out over analytical data and love looking at usage metrics to drive feature development? Each type of role has a different focus, so find the things that excite you.

2. Consider the Environment
   Do you want to reach a huge market of customers and iterate on minor feature developments and enhancements? Or do you want to work closely with larger business customers and develop a deeper understanding of their problems and how your product can evolve to meet those specific needs? No right or wrong answer, just what gets you pumped up each day.

Remember, it’s about aligning your career desires, your core strengths, and the types of challenges that get you fired up to solve each day. We are problem solvers, so what types of problems do you love solving and how do you like solving them? Many PMs start in one area and end up in another. All the roles share a common framework of ensuring we are delivering business value for our organization and delighting our customers with innovative and useful solutions to problems they either have or don't even realize they have yet.