5 Factors that Influence the Product Manager’s Role Across Companies

If you are exploring a career in product management, or have recently started, I am sure you would be astonished to see the extent of variations across the roles on offer. If not, do a quick search on the term ‘product manager’ on any job site and browse through the first page of the search result before you read further.

I am sure you would find huge variations in the responsibilities and the required skills mentioned in the job descriptions – some companies are looking for experience using tools that you might not have even heard of, some would be asking for experience in a specific domain, while some would be really insistent on a scrum certification.  So how do you know where you’d be a good fit or how to envision your career path?

A critical step here would be to understand the reasons behind the vast variations in the role. While a lot of informative articles are available across multiple platforms covering the reasons for the same, I believe the following 5 factors covers the explanation more holistically:

1. Core business of the company
2. Size of the company
3. Strategic focus of the company
4. Position on the product life-cycle curve
5. External or Internal Product

1. Core business of the company

The biggest factor deciding the role of a product manager is the end user of the product – is it a business or an individual customer? A lot of excellent resources are available that explain how a B2B product management role differs from a B2C one, so I am not going to repeat that here. You can read the following article for an in-depth coverage: The biggest difference between B2B and B2C product managers

However, I feel that B2B and B2C are too broad of a categorization which needs to be split further, specially if you are trying to understand the niches and plan your career around them. I would recommend thinking about the following segments (instead of just B2B vs B2C) when you plan your career path and would encourage you to talk to product managers in the segments which interest you for in-depth understanding of various roles.

1.1 Enterprise Product Companies (B2B)

Examples: Temenos, Oracle, SAP

• These are the companies which built softwares for other businesses to solve key pain areas
• Most of the older companies designed products for on-premise deployments. But recently, with the popularity of cloud and SaaS offerings there is an ongoing focus to be cloud ready. This is the reason that ‘cloud’ would be one of the common keywords in PM job postings by this segment of companies
• Domain experience is highly desirable
• As a product manager, you would need to constantly negotiate with customers/account managers in order to ensure that road-map/backlog doesn’t get tilted to satisfy only specific customers
• You need to be good at articulating the value delivered by your product; because of the complex workflows having direct data on delivered value might be difficult
• The PM might work on a single product/product module for years as the product maturity cycles are really long

1.2 SaaS Companies (B2B)

Examples: Hubspot, Postman

• The products at these companies were built from the ground up to be cloud native
• You’ll have a flood of feedback, ideas, inputs from your users
• Switching cost for your customers is very low, so it becomes critical to keep an eye on the key metrics to identify the churn points and quickly take action
• The road-map is relatively flexible for quick response to user demands
• The product manager would need to work on defining and ‘maintaining’ the pricing model

1.3 Technology Services Company (B2B)

Examples: Accenture, TCS, DXC Technology

• The identifying check is that you are going to work on a custom product for a specific customer
• These companies used to work on waterfall model with a lot of emphasis on documentation and processes. While they have now adopted agile development, but the success metrics still revolve around delivering a scope within budget and timelines

1.4 Consumer Internet Companies (B2C)

Examples: Facebook, Uber, Netflix

• These companies provide a service to the end user with internet at it’s core
• Companies hiring in this segment put a lot of emphasis on prior ‘consumer internet’ experience
• UX and UI are critical for the products and the product managers should expect to work closely with dedicated design teams

1.5 E-Commerce Companies (B2C and B2B)

Examples: Alibaba, Amazon, Flipkart

• There are high chances that instead of being the custodian of a product, you would be the custodian of a group of metrics – cart abandonment rate, bounce rate, NPS, etc
• You’ll work very closely with other product managers, category managers and business managers
• Google Analytics/Mixpanel would be indispensable tools for you

1.6 Non-Tech Companies (B2B and B2C)

Examples: Maersk, DuPont, Bank of America

• There are the companies where technology is not the core offering but still a critical aspect to achieve success in their business operations and value delivery to customers
• Mostly larger companies take the decision to incubate in-house technology teams instead of repeatedly buying from technology vendors
• A deep understanding of the offerings and business operations of the company would help the product manager in successfully delivering products
• Key challenge for a PM would be to deal with competing priorities of the stakeholders

2. Size of the Company

The size of the company is going to heavily influence how the product manager’s role is defined and the product team is structured.

	Small company	Large Company
Responsibilities	Greater responsibilities – including multiple products, research, validations, business strategy, etc	Focused responsibilities – specific product or product area. You might be helped by business analysts, product owners, data analysts
Reporting Structure	Directly work with an executives, CEO or the co-founders	Product team hierarchy reporting to a Chief Product Officer, who might report to the CTO/COO/CEO depending on the importance of technology products to the company’s core business
Metrics	Focus on both user as well as business metrics	You would be required to focus on specific set of metrics – either on the revenue or user side. The business metrics are usually entrusted to more senior PMs in the product hierarchy
Road-map	Shorter term, agile road-map with focus to quickly adopt to changing market and business conditions	Longer term, need to balance between a lot of competing priorities across different stakeholders, balance trade-off between existing and new users

3. Strategic Priorities of the Company

It is possible to find two companies with similar products, customer segments & problem areas to have huge differences in the way a product manager’s role is defined. There can be huge differences in the product team size, control over engineering bandwidth, autonomy and success metrics.

This is because the companies might have opted to choose two different strategic priorities: sales-first vs product-first.

The sales driven company would put meeting revenue targets foremost while the product driven company puts more importance on product excellence.

If you are interested to read more about the revenue-led vs a product-led strategy, I would recommend the following article: Product-Led vs. Revenue-Driven

4. Position on the Product Life-cycle Curve

Irrespective of the size and core business of the the company, a product manager’s priorities and goals are heavily influenced by the current stage of the product on the product life-cycle curve.

Introduction: The goal at this stage is to achieve the product-market fit as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Developing a good understanding of the industry and preferably some prior experience of working with the potential customer segment would be an excellent starting point as a product manager at this stage.

Growth: If you see the words ‘growth hacker’ on the job description, then it is a strong indicator that the product is at the growth stage. It’s expected to see many new competitors trying to replicate your success. Here the focus would be to stay ahead of the competition while meeting the demands of the current customers.

Maturity: Focus is on maintaining the market share, keeping the customer churn in check while being on the look-out for any changing market or customer demands.

Decline: Personally, I think it is one of the most challenging role to pick up as a product manager. You need to be able to come up with the best possible outcome while managing the stakeholder expectations. You need to work out what needs to be phased out, come up with next investment options and identify any potential pivots.

5. External vs Internal Product

Within each company, there are going to be products which are exposed to paying customers and products which are build for internal users. For instance, a company might develop a demo platform to help their sales teams deliver impact-full customer demonstrations.

There are both advantages & challenges of working on an internal product. The primary advantage is that the users are much more accessible and you can directly see the impact of your product around you. On the flip side, your product’s success is not necessarily linked to only the KPIs as internal politics might also play a role.

If you would like to read more about internal product management, you can read it here: Internal Product Management: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Conclusion

If after reading this, you are even more confused about how to make sense of various product management roles, it’s absolutely fine. The purpose of this article was to equip you with the dimensions that’ll help you better understand and communicate while charting out your product management career. All the best for your PM career journey!