In the tech world, the Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Sales functions have each had specialities for years. For example:
Design → Product Design, Brand Design, UI/UX, Research, Interaction Design, Service Design
Eng → Frontend, Backend, Mobile (iOS/Android), Web, Full stack, Payments
Marketing → Brand, Content, Performance marketing, SEO, CRM/Lifecycle, Marketing Ops, PR, Product marketing
Sales → Inbound, Outbound, SDR/BDR, AE, Technical Sales, CSM
But, Product Management has not yet defined specialities. This leads people to think a Product Manager (PM) is a PM — meaning we hastily assume all Product Manager roles are created equal and the best Product Managers are those who know everything across different types of product work/stages. That's simply not the reality of the situation since Product specializations are emerging informally as a mess. When we do a quick search right now, we find Masterclass looking for a Payments Product Manager, TikTok searching for a Growth Product Manager candidate, and ClassDojo hunting for a 0 → 1 Product Leader. There's little understanding of what these Product Manager roles mean and how each is unique, but needed, at different types of organizations.
Since distinct Product Management specializations haven't been formally codified, we'll lay them out in this article:
First off, we'll introduce problems that arise when we believe all Product Manager roles are created equal
Then, we'll cover the 4 types of product work
From there, we'll define the Product Management specializations with key skills and examples
We'll end with emerging specializations and what the next Product specializations could be
Adam Fishman is an Executive in Residence at Reforge. He was the Chief Product and Growth Officer at Imperfect Foods, VP Product and Growth at Patreon, and Head of Growth at Lyft.
Keya Patel is an Operator in Residence at Reforge. Previously, she was the Director of Product Growth at Headspace and a PM focused on Growth & Monetization at Dropbox.
With contributions by Ravi Mehta (Reforge Partner/EIR, former CPO at Tinder, former VP Product at Tripadvisor, former Product Director at Facebook) and Crystal Widjaja (CPO at Kumu, former Reforge Partner/EIR, former SVP Growth and Business Intelligence at Gojek)
Problems that arise when we think all Product Management roles are created equal
Most people looking to understand the Product world, and even early career PMs, think that there's a standard type of Product Manager. They believe all Product Manager roles are created equal and successful Product Managers are experts in the same areas. There are clear problems that arise when we think this way:
Tools don't transfer - Product Managers apply the same tool to all situations
Slow and steady struggle - Product Managers flounder without knowing why
Focus fatigue - Product Manager learning is slowed down because they don't know where to focus
Talent turmoil - Companies don't know why their Product Manager hire isn't working out
Competing colleagues - Product Managers are compared against one another unfairly
Tools don't transfer
What this is:
Product Managers (or other managers, peers, etc) think all Product roles are created equal, they expect success in one product area/stage translates to another situation easily.
Product Managers then apply the same tool to all problems, which leads to hitting a career progression ceiling because they don't know when to pull in other resources or take a totally different approach to an area that is not within their strength(s).
Tools don't transfer example:
A Product Manager with a background in payments infrastructure at Etsy is asked to start thinking about a totally new product/revenue area with a small team.
This Product Manager automatically gravitates towards setting up infrastructure to scale payments for Etsy's new product.
They don't intuitively consider areas more fitting in this new product situation: market research, user interaction with the product, product market fit, or modeling addressable revenue impact.
Slow and steady struggle
What this is:
Continuing on the point above, when a new product area isn't the same as one a Product Manager has previously encountered, the Product Manager can start to struggle — they can't definitively decide on team direction, don't provide valuable impact to the org, and begin to doubt their own Product Management skills.
From here, the Product Manager can continue to work through the new area, but will surely be less effective than others with strength and expertise in that area. Or, they'll work to switch back to an area they feel more comfortable in.
Slow and steady struggle example:
Still pulling from the previous example, the Etsy Product Manager with a background in data/infrastructure feels deflated when their manager only asks questions related to customer research and market sizing.
The Product Manager senses that their manager cares minimally about the platform/scaling work associated with the new product. And, the manager wrongly assumes the Product Manager should have strong abilities to push the boundaries on innovative product development.
The Product Manager starts to look for jobs outside of Etsy because their strengths aren't aligning with this new initiative. They would prefer to work on product areas that can help scale organizations instead of a completely new, and unproven, area of the business.
Focus fatigue
What this is:
When Product Management roles are assumed to be equal across organizations or types of product work, PM learning usually slows down because they aren't sure where to focus.
This is especially the case when a new Product Manager takes on a product or transfers from one team to another — they might be incentivized to 'create a strategic vision' to get promoted, but in reality the team needs a detailed week-by-week roadmap. Because there is conflict in what the Product Manager should look like vs. what is needed, the Product Manager doesn't know where to focus and their learning can slow down.
Focus fatigue example:
A manager (the CEO) of a small startup emphasized pricing is of utmost concern and hired a Product Manager that specializes in pricing/monetizing products from LinkedIn.
The Product Manager starts to dig into data and sees weekly revenue is growing quickly but there is a steep drop off in the number of customers who stay engaged with the product after 2 weeks of purchasing.
When the Product Manager brings this up to the CEO, they ask the PM to pivot their role to user engagement and expect the PMs to be versatile.
At LinkedIn and in their previous jobs, the Product Manager had little experience in engagement and doesn't know where to start, let alone if they should still think about pricing/monetization (what they were originally hired for).
Talent turmoil
What this is:
When a company hires a Product Manager and assumes an amazing Product Manager at another org will translate to being an amazing Product Manager here, without vetting for specific areas of expertise or if the Product Manager's skills will be a good fit for what's needed in the role.
What can end up happening is that the company hires the wrong person and they don't understand why the hire isn't working out, since they came highly recommended or were from a company with exponential growth.
Talent turmoil example:
A Product Manager who spent the last 3 years of their career at Snapchat on their chat and runstreaks feature was hired at TikTok. Because chat on Snapchat is established, the TikTok team thought they were making the right hire to focus on social/connections.
Unfortunately, the TikTok team didn't realize that the hire was best at optimizing existing products/features, and wouldn't be able to quickly onboard to partner with design on newer concepts for features like direct messaging or commenting.
Competing colleagues
What this is:
When a company or hiring manager thinks that all Product Management roles are created equal, they compare Product Managers in the back of their head.
This isn't fair because the Product Managers likely have completely different strengths or areas of interest, and then feel pitted against one another in their approach to working with teams or on product responsibilities.
Competing colleagues example:
When it comes time for annual bonuses, a VP Product at Instacart compares two Product Managers at a similar level and compensation bracket: one PM did a lot of work to optimize the sign up page and another Product Manager introduced new partnership and store integrations to Instacart.
The Product Manager who introduced new partnership and store integrations was constantly asking questions to the Engineering and Partnerships teams, and the VP noticed.
The VP decides to give a little larger of a bonus to the Product Manager who seemed to do 'harder' work with vocal cross-functional teams. In this scenario, the VP is assuming all PMs should be interacting with other teams to be rewarded more generously.
The basics: 4 types of product work
In the last section we showed the problems that take place when people assume all Product Management roles are created equal. In light of those, there are still some skills that any type of successful Product Manager needs, regardless of their specialization. These are usually assumed skills and include some form of:
technical & data comfort around analysis, interpreting dashboards and key call outs, understanding or setting metrics/financial goals, and working with developers/data science comfortably
communication & collaboration to motivate and lead a cross functional team toward a goal, while also getting buy-in from others (whether that be someone on another team or an exec)
problem solving to break down an ambiguous product/customer need and go about experimenting or iterating to find an appropriate solution
user understanding to empathize, listen, and co-create with the end customer and solve for an existing pain point or identify new pain points
strategic thinking to recenter on larger picture organization, user, or investor goals while also taking into account the many moving parts across a team, product, or organization
We cover the underpinnings of product work, and much more, in Reforge's Product Management Foundations program.
Exclusive preview of a lesson to help you make strategic career decisions and build your career roadmap.
People don't recognize product specializations because...
People don't recognize product specializations because we tend to think about all product work as the same type of work. We just apply the basic skills from above to every product area. But, there are fundamentally different types of product work which require different tools, processes, skill sets, and success metrics.
Fareed Mosavat (VP Programs/Partners @ Reforge, Ex Director of Product @ Slack) and Casey Winters (CPO @ Eventbrite, Ex Product Growth Lead @ Pinterest) discuss this in detail in Product Work Beyond Product-Market Fit:
"Most PMs are unaware of the different types of product work and which one is most relevant to them for what they are working on. This makes it difficult for them to be effective in their role, as they are using a sub-optimal or incorrect method (hammer/nail problem) and not thinking strategically about their product and how to transition to the other problem types."
"PMs tend to believe what previously worked for them or the organization in the past will work again in the future. As an organization grows, and you grow as a PM, the number, the variance, and the complexity of these different types of product work grow."
Then Fareed and Casey outline four types of product work:
Feature Work
The type of work that most product managers think about is feature work, this is usually where most product managers start in their careers.
Once a product reaches initial product-market fit, feature work creates and captures value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
Growth Work
Before a feature is built, you should be asking the question: "How are users going to find out about and build a habit around this feature?" This is where growth product work comes in.
Growth product work creates and captures value by capturing more of the existing market.
You are typically connecting customers to the value that already exists in the product, rather than creating new value.
The area of work known as "growth" has been on a rollercoaster since the inception of the growth team at Facebook.
Scaling Work
As a product continues to accelerate its growth, new bottlenecks occur that slow down or inhibit the team's ability to ship new features and move quickly. This is where scaling work comes into play.
Scaling is important because it ensures that the product team maintains the ability to ship new things across feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.
Product-Market Fit Expansion
A product will hit initial product-market fit (PMF). Then, through feature work, growth work, and scaling work, the team works hard to fulfill and incrementally expand the potential of the initial PMF. But, at some point growth of the product slows down as it hits some type of saturation.
PMF expansion is increasing the ceiling on PMF in a non-incremental way to expand into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.
Many people, outside of Product and Engineering, believe a PM is an expert across all 4 of these areas of product work, tapping into the previous idea that all PMs are created equally. Early career Product Managers think they have to tackle initiatives across feature, growth, scaling, and PMF work within their first year in the role.
In reality, a Product Manager should master 1 to 2 areas of product work at best, as we emphasized in Crossing the Canyon: From Product Manager to Product Leader. This is because depth in one type of product work should eventually translate to breadth across multiple types of product work, if a PM is looking to progress in their career without mastery of every single Product detail (which would be impossible anyways).
Product Management Specializations
In the last section we talked about the 4 types of product work: feature, growth, scaling, and product market fit expansion. In this section, we'll discuss:
How each of these product work areas map directly to the Product Management specialities
Skills that differentiate each speciality
Key collaborators for each speciality - outside of the common Product, Eng, Design, Analytics partners
Tangible examples of each PM specialization
Feature Work → Core PM
Product Managers that focus mostly on product feature work are Core PMs. Core PMs are laser focused on solving for a customer pain point or need.
Common themes (across organizations) that Core PMs work on include search, community/social, international, newsfeed, and other experiences that are critical in the customer-facing sense.
Some other names (and sub-specialities) for Core Product Manager = Feature Product Manager, UX Product Manager, core consumer Product Manager, enterprise Product Manager, community Product Manager, and international Product Manager.
Key Core PM skills = user centered design, holistic product thinking, problem and hypothesis centered, end to end user experience, user empathy, research pro
Extra close collaboration with: Research, Design, Support
"At Patreon, one of our core features was the public-facing Creator page. This page was key to how creators presented themselves to their fans. Over time, PMs on the core team improved the experience quite drastically. One area of change was how posts appeared (visible, locked, blurred, teased, etc.). Another example was having distinct versions of the page for new fans vs. converted patrons, each of whom had different needs and considerations when visiting a creator's page. Successful PMs on the team thought about the fan to creator experience holistically and were comfortable researching and testing different perspectives.”
- Adam Fishman (EIR at Reforge, Former CPO at Imperfect Foods, Former VP Product at Patreon, Former Head of Growth at Lyft)
3 (real) job descriptions of Core PMs from Square, Whatsapp, & Stripe
Square / title = Product Manager, Restaurants
This position on the Restaurants team will focus on two core parts of the Square for Restaurants growth strategy, namely;
Building out the central POS (and soon to be launched mobile version) that Restaurants rely on to run their businesses
The expansion of the Square for Restaurants product to international markets.
To be successful in this role, the ideal candidate must be able to transform a deep empathy of a restaurant's needs & pains into elegant software, to think tactically and strategically, to manage deep x-functional collaboration and methodical execution.
Copied from Square's career page at careers.squareup.com (August 2021)
Whatsapp / title = Product Manager
As a Product Manager, you will be involved in every aspect of the product development process, from brainstorming the next product innovation to working directly with designers and engineers to implement features.
You will use your start-up mindset and your full range of product development skills to produce elegantly simple features. You’ll be expected to push the boundaries of what’s possible in a mobile app, while sharing in our healthy obsession for quality and attention to detail.
Copied from whatsapp.com (August 2021)
Stripe / title = Product Manager, Connect
As a Product Manager on the Connect team at Stripe, you will be devising strategy, developing product requirements, and overseeing execution for some of the highest impact initiatives that serve modern marketplaces and software platforms.
On a day to day basis you would spend your time split between external meetings with customers and internal discussions with your engineering, marketing, analytics, and sales counterparts.
This role will provide the opportunity to develop the strategy for one of Stripe’s core products and get feedback on your plans directly from Stripe’s leadership team.
Copied from stripe.com/jobs (August 2021)
Growth Work → Growth PM
Product managers that focus on Growth work are Growth PMs (yes, this is the most intuitive specialization naming!). Growth PMs are typically laser focused on the customer's journey with a product, through the lens of business metrics like acquisition, CAC, sign ups, free trial starts, conversion/purchase rates, monetization, ARPU, and retention.
Although there may be slight overlap with Core PMs, Growth PMs usually focus on parts of the experience related to sign up/registration, onboarding, conversion/monetization, pricing, referrals/sharing, retention/transaction moments, and revenue growth.
Some other names (and sub-specialities) for Growth Product Manager = Activation Product Manager, Engagement Product Manager, Retention Product Manager, Monetization Product Manager, Conversion Product Manager, Growth infra Product Manager. To learn more about growth work and growth Product Managers, check out Reforge's Growth Series, our flagship program on how companies grow and how to think about growth in your own role.
Key Growth Product Manager skills = experimentation, optimization, speed to deploy, marketing skills, financial / experimentation modeling, quick decision making, channel-based skills like SEO, pricing philosophy, solid data and statistics skills, iterative development
Extra close collaboration with: Finance, Data, Marketing
"I started in sales at Dropbox. That's where I saw purchasing page confusion; potential customers didn't understand how to define licenses for team members and they wanted reassurance their credit card wouldn't be charged during the free trial. I would offer suggestions to the Dropbox Growth team on how to ease customer purchasing concerns. From there, the Growth team would A/B test ideas and see increases in trials and purchases! With my sales background, I was already motivated by revenue impact and experimentation — which translated well as I became a member of the Growth team."
- Keya Patel (OIR at Reforge, Ex-Director of Product Growth at Headspace, Ex-Product Growth at Dropbox)
3 (real) job descriptions of Growth PMs from Zillow, Slack, & ZipRecruiter
Zillow / title = Sr Product Manager, Growth
As a Sr. Product Manager in Acquisition, you’ll work closely with the SEO, Engineering, and partner Product teams to synthesize user needs with SEO concepts to build both excellent products and a principled understanding of what drives organic search success.
Be the go-to voice for SEO product and a vocal evangelist for Acquisition initiatives across Zillow as you partner across the organization to deliver a cohesive experience.
Copied from Zillow Group's career page at careers.zillowgroup.com (August 2021)
Slack / title = Director of Product, Activation
Slack is looking for a Product Leader for our Activation team. This person will lead the team responsible for helping the 1M+ teams that start using Slack every year successfully get off the ground, across our $1B+ run-rate Self-Service and Enterprise businesses.
The team owns the entire new customer and new user journey across every platform (web, desktop, and mobile), from landing on Slack.com through sign-up, onboarding and the entire first month experience.
Drive a step-function increase in the rate new teams and new users become successful and stay retained on Slack.
Copied from Slack's career page at slack.com/careers (August 2021)
ZipRecruiter / title = Lead Product Manager, Monetization
As a Lead Product Manager for our Employer Product Team, you are responsible for the ideation, development, launch, and optimization of our monetization initiatives.
You have a deep understanding of monetization levers and tradeoffs, and you are willing to spend the time necessary to keep up with the competitive landscape and utilize that knowledge to build better product.
Work with executive, product, engineering, design, marketing, and sales teams to launch and operationalize pricing initiatives
Copied from ZipRecruiter's Greenhouse jobs page at https://boards.greenhouse.io/ziprecruiter (August 2021)
Scaling Work → Platform Product Manager
Platform Product Managers focus on scaling product work. Platform Product Managers are laser focused on their internal customers/needs and scaling internal platforms and services for continued organizational growth.
Areas of scope that a Platform Product Manager might oversee include: trust and safety, security, moderation, support and customer experience, internal data and analytics, machine learning, payments and billing, authentication/identity, and personalization.
Typically the 'customers' for platform Product Managers are internal stakeholders and other product teams, instead of external-facing users.
Some other names (and sub-specialities) for Platform Product Manager = Tech Product Manager, Data Product Manager, Infra Product Manager, Security Product Manager, Identity Product Manager, Internal Tools Product Manager, and Personalization Product Manager. To learn more scaling work and platform Product Managers, check out Reforge's programs on Scaling Product Delivery.
Key Platform Product Manager skills = scaled development thinking, technical/engineering/data thinking, comfortable with tech stack, ability to cross between tech and business stakeholders, build v buy decision making, internal peer/stakeholder management as customers, efficiency expert, service design
Extra close collaboration with: Data/Data Science, Customer Support, Legal, Finance/Accounting
"I recently moved a PM from working on the core ecommerce platform to be an Infrastructure PM. Some of the telltale signs were that they liked reading documentation of APIs, they were excited to figure out bugs and finding small optimizations within the services, and they cared a lot about quality of our services. In contrast, the ecommerce role was visionary, had huge design bets, and was an area they were struggling with."
- Crystal Widjaja (CPO at Kumu, former Reforge Partner/EIR, former SVP Growth and Business Intelligence at Gojek)
3 (real) job descriptions of Platform Product Managers from Affirm, Strava & Spotify
Affirm / title = Senior Product Manager, Consumer Identity
As the Product Manager for the Membership and Identity teams, you’ll focus on developing a single view of each customer and the various products and services they use.
Own the identity and membership roadmaps, collaborating with key stakeholders to set long term objectives, KPIs and closely track progress against the team’s goals.
Design centralized systems and platforms that enable us to deliver a seamless customer account management experience across all touchpoints within the Affirm network.
Copied from Affirm's Greenhouse jobs page at https://boards.greenhouse.io/ziprecruiter (August 2021)
Strava / title = Senior Product Manager, Trust & Safety
Strava is looking for a product manager to join our team and lead the strategy and product development process for our Trust Team.
Build a prioritized roadmap that modernizes and improves our athletes' experiences to help keep our community safe
Set a strategic vision that maps the projects we deliver into a broader ecosystem of systems and tools to support the future needs of Trust & Safety
Copied from Strava's Greenhouse jobs page at boards.greenhouse.io/strava (August 2021)
Spotify / title = Associate Product Manager, Content Platform
Be responsible for the product strategy of multiple internal tooling products and CRM for internal operations teams.
You have previous experience working with Salesforce, Zendesk or an internal CRM as part of your product portfolio and thrive working side by side with your internal customers.
Copied from Spotify's jobs page at https://www.lifeatspotify.com/jobs (August 2021)
Product Market Fit Expansion → Innovation Product Management
Innovation Product Managers are laser focused on identifying and experimenting with new opportunities to reach and expand product market fit.
They do this by exploring adjacent users, developing new verticals that solves for additional pain points, creating net new products, or brainstorming novel revenue streams.
Typically, Innovation Product Managers exist as (1) the first product hire, or co-founder, who helps the product reach initial PMF or (2) part of a new skunkworks or innovation based team at a growing/established org.
Some other names (and sub-specialities) for Innovation Product Manager = Expansion Product Manager, 0 → 1 Product Manager, New Verticals Product Manager, Skunkworks / Stealth Product Manager, Third Horizon Product Manager, R&D Product Manager, and Special Projects Product Manager.
Key Innovation Product Manager skills = 0-1 thinking, extreme comfort w/ ambiguity, reference customer development, strong visioning skills, PMF discovery and ability to pivot without attachment to ideas, fundraising, ability to story tell to execs / investors / board
Extra close collaboration with: Executive team, Research, Customers
"At Patreon one of our areas of zero-to-one was on Merchandise for Membership. We knew creators wanted to offer merch to their patrons, and were jumping through serious hoops to make it happen. But, we didn't know how we would fit this into the Patreon model. We conducted a ton of research on the merch space, prototyped (and threw away) a lot of different solutions, built a new P&L for merch (which had its own revenue stream), and we even acquired an entire team to help us with this effort."
- Adam Fishman (EIR at Reforge, Former CPO at Imperfect Foods, Former VP Product at Patreon, Former Head of Growth at Lyft)
3 (real) job descriptions of Innovation Product Managers from Airbnb, DoorDash, & Netflix
Airbnb / title = Product Manager, Special Projects
As a Product Manager on the Special Projects team, you’ll lead a new product initiative within an emerging space. With your entrepreneurial spirit and pragmatic approach, you’ll quickly develop a deep understanding of the market landscape, uncover and size areas of opportunity, develop our product strategy, and drive the product from concept to reality.
Establish the vision, strategy, and direction on a new product initiative
Copied from Airbnb's career page at careers.airbnb.com (August 2021)
DoorDash / title = Director of Product Management, New Verticals
DoorDash is rapidly expanding beyond the restaurant vertical into areas like Grocery and Convenience. Our vision is to bring the entire city to your fingertips on DoorDash.
As the leader for New Verticals, you will build a team that will solve some of the most challenging problems for building a global network that can deliver anything. On the Dasher side, how we make new types of jobs (shopping for groceries, filling a prescription) easy for a Dasher, ultimately creating the world’s most flexible pool of labor.
If you are successful, over the next few years you will have taken DoorDash from a restaurant-focused product to a service that connects all forms of local commerce.
Copied from DoorDash's career page at careers.doordash.com (August 2021)
Netflix / title = Product Manager - Kids & Family Product Innovation
In this role, you will lead product innovation for the Netflix kids experience globally and across all devices as part of a very senior group of product innovators responsible for continuously improving our service and delighting our members.
The leader in this role will own and drive key areas of our product innovation work. They will have the responsibility to continually develop new and successful product strategies for connecting kids and families to stories that they love. The focus of this role is the kids member experience: all content discovery and playback with a key emphasis on evolving our dedicated kids experience.
Copied from Netflix's career page at jobs.netflix.com (August 2021)
The chart below synthesizes the focus area, skill sets, key collaborators, and type of product work most closely associated with a Core PM, Growth PM, Platform PM, and Innovation PM.
Pricing Product Managers, Payments Product Managers: What's the next specialization?
In this piece, we established Product Management specializations: Core PM, Growth PM, Platform PM, and Innovation PM. But, as we hinted at throughout the article, we're also noticing sub-specialization surfacing within these higher level categories. Within each specialization there are vectors that cause further specialization, for example:
Core PM vectors = type of product (e.g. Social) or industry category (e.g. Enterprise)
Growth PM vector = funnel stage (e.g. Acquisition, Activation)
Platform PM vector = type of platform knowledge (e.g. Security, Personalization)
Innovation PM vector = stage of org (e.g. 0→1, New Vertical)
🧬 CORE PM
Remember the common vectors that cause Core PM to specialize even further = type of product (e.g. Social) or industry category (e.g. Enterprise)
Examples of Core PM sub-specialities:
B2C (Consumer) PM
B2B (Enterprise) PM
Community PM
Social PM
Newsfeed PM
International PM
Feature PM
UX PM
🌱 GROWTH PM
The vector that causes Growth PM to specialize even more = funnel stage (e.g. Acquisition, Activation)
Examples of Growth PM sub-specialities:
Acquisition PM
Activation PM
Engagement PM
Retention PM
Monetization PM
Pricing PM
Subscriptions PM
Conversion PM
☁️ PLATFORM PM
The Platform PM vector for further specialization is type of platform knowledge (e.g. Security, Personalization)
Examples of Platform PM sub-specialities:
Tech PM
Data PM
Infrastructure PM
Trust/Security PM
Identity PM
Internal Tools/Tooling PM
Personalization PM
Machine Learning PM
💡INNOVATION PM
The vector that causes Innovation PMs to specialize even more is the stage of org (e.g. early stage org = 0 → 1, growing/established org seeking PMF expansion = New Vertical)
Examples of Innovation PM sub-specialities:
0 → 1 PM
First PM (also commonly titled as Chief Product Officer, VP Product, or Head of Product at a startup)
Expansion PM
New Verticals PM
New Initiatives PM PM
Third Horizon PM
R&D PM
Special Projects PM
The next bigProduct Management specialization starts as a super specialty
Let's think back to how the Growth specialization came about:
STARTED AS = Growth began as a super specialization — originally Growth roles were named Growth Manager or Growth Marketing Manager. At this stage, 'Growth PMs' worked with very small teams of 1-3 engineers or marketers doing a mix of marketing or product experiments, that other teams weren't involved with or paying attention to. These mini-teams were scrappy and could only work on their initiatives for a certain percentage of a week, or for a set amount of time (like a quarter) to prove out Growth initiatives.
EVOLVED TO = As teams saw the impact Growth PMs and their teams had, in terms of boosting business/funnel metrics, Growth evolved to formally be part of Marketing or Product functions. There were specific roles that focused 100% on Growth and optimizing for areas of the growth funnel: acquisition, activation, conversion, engagement, and retention. This is when the role took on the title of Growth PM. Moreover, the adoption of Growth PMs happened across the tech industry from healthcare focused companies (think of Oscar or Hims/Hers) to bottoms up SaaS companies (think of Atlasssian or Dropbox).
NOW AT = Currently, Growth PMs are housed partially or fully within Product teams or even separate Growth departments. Usually Growth initiatives pique the interest of the board, CEO, COO, and other members of an exec team because of the impact to quarterly forecasts and sustained revenue and retention. That's why Growth PMs are a distinct speciality with differing strengths, goals, and collaborators, versus being part of the Core PM speciality. Oftentimes, product orgs that neglect having Growth PM roles are seen as less serious or missing out on key growth opportunities. And, investors and early-stage CEOs are always on the hunt for Growth consultants or their first Head of Product/Growth hire.
Just like Growth, the next Product Management specialization will start as a super specialty. As the sub-specialty gains traction, it will have leverage points across all types of tech companies and then will elevate to specialization status. Right now, the obvious sub-speciality we see arising is the Machine Learning (ML) PM. This is because ML has become popular across all of the startup and tech world. Teams across the industry are being challenged to keep up with innovation and integrate even basic models (time of day, personalization, language processing, engagement, etc) into their product to cater to users. And, it's now a commonly held belief that ML can apply to every product.
Time will tell if ML Product Managers become a specialty. But, for now, it's imperative to name the Product Management specialities (Core, Growth, Platform, Innovation PMs) because it's how the Product industry and careers are informally defined. This article serves as a foundation for establishing and explaining those PM specialities. The next article in this PM specialization series will cover how you can navigate the specializations throughout your career.
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