One Size Doesn’t Fit All: 7 PM Job Descriptions Your Team Needs to Cover

Every discipline has sub fields and specializations, but PM roles are often the least well defined and least consistent from team to team. This can make it hard to figure out if product engineering teams really have all the support they need to be successful, and what jobs within the scope of “all the work that isn’t getting done right now” should become your top priorities to cover next. 

At Microsoft in the early 2000s we used to talk about how the program manager job title had been adapted to so many different kinds of jobs that we couldn’t count on a common skill set. There were program managers who figured out what new functionality to build into the marquee Microsoft products, wrote the specs, and worked with the teams to build and ship new releases. Other PMs focused more on getting content published to MSN properties, worked with scientists in the research division, worked with external standards bodies on XML and accessibility guidelines, guided internal IT projects, and implemented specific enterprise solutions for Microsoft Consulting Services. PM-like title variations across the company included product managers in the marketing department, project managers and product planners attached to product engineering teams, people focused on engineering excellence across the company, etc. The day to day PM work with standards-bodies or enterprise consulting clients was so different than designing and building the next release of Outlook, that it actually required different skills and talents for success.

Working with early stage startups is the polar opposite of the big technology company environment. The team starts small, and the company fills roles when the pain of the missing skill set or the unassigned workload gets too great. In the meantime, people “wear multiple hats” or “pinch-hit” by doing whatever needs doing, even if it’s work they’ve never done before. Consultants or outside firms are called in to fill temporary expertise and capacity gaps, and startup employees and founders constantly reach out to friends/colleagues/friends of friends to get the perspective of prior experience in the midst of tackling partial first-time roles. As the company grows and becomes more successful, a few additional roles are created, but even successful companies that have grown past the startup stage and hold valuations in the $500M+ range are likely to have gotten by without many of the specializations and distinct job functions that a world-renowned technology company has. I know a pre-IPO tech company that has gotten by for years with a few technical program managers and is just now creating a separate product management discipline – it’s not that unusual.

Given these extremes of a few technology titans with lots of PM sub-specialties and title confusion problems, versus many more companies operating daily with missing PM roles and skills, how can a product manager best find the right fit? What’s a good way to chart a PM career? How can a team best indentify and prioritize the skills and contributions it may need next?

The Engineering-PM-Marketing Job Spectrum:

Here’s a tool that I created to help organize my thoughts and prioritize future hires a few years ago. When I made the first version of this table, I was responsible for both product and marketing at my startup, and I was thinking through how I could best cover all the most important work in the PM-Marketing parts of the spectrum with just a few people.  In doing so, I looked at other startups and larger companies and their job descriptions in addition to drawing from our company’s day to day gaps and needs. 

Seven PM roles within the white band above makes me think of this part of the Enginering-PM-Marketing spectrum as the PM Rainbow. :-)

Note almost no product organizations have separate full time employees in all seven of these roles. But it’s very inconsistent as to which roles/responsibilities get grouped together into a single PM position. Almost no job candidates are talented and experienced in all these areas either – which means it’s especially tricky to find role-PM candidate fit, even though there are plenty of people with PM experience on their resumes.

Let’s dig into specific PM sub-roles:

1. Project Management and Process Facilitation:

Specialized job titles: Scrum Master, Project Manager.

Key responsibilities: work estimates, setting and driving to schedules, load balancing, tracking project metrics, status communications, identifying inefficiencies and correcting them, project management tools and encouraging their usage, providing the right frameworks for decision-making and resource allocation, minimizing distractions and switching costs, ensuring that all disciplines are set up to do their best work, driving tradeoff decisions on time/resources/product scope.

2. Technical Program Management:

Specialized job titles: Program Manager, TPM.

Key responsibilities: feature and technical design, specs, product/project plan communication and buy-in, answering all questions about feature details and decisions, ensuring functionality and quality meet the bar, decisions about bugs and feature changes, keeping development and test unblocked, whatever needs doing to finish the release.

3. User Experience:

Specialized job titles: UX Program Manager, Interaction designer, Information architect

Key responsibilities: innovative early designs in planning, usable UI designs for products, validation of designs (usability tests, customer satisfaction, A/B tests and metrics), management of creation/delivery of graphic design assets, ensuring consistency in designs (design guidelines), maintaining relationships with a set of customers or customer proxies for product management purposes.

4. Whole Product Management:

I’ll write a future article about this, but the concept is that every touch point between customers and the company matters from a product perspective, and a drastic improvement in any of these touch points can transform your business. E.g. Zappos and shipping – if they’d only worked on their web experience, would they have built the customer loyalty they did? Differentiated themselves the way they did?

Specialized job titles: Product Manager