From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

How to think about the type of PM you want to be

From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

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How to think about the type of PM you want to be

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- Hey everyone, so we know now that there's a few different types of product management roles, and each one of these sometimes differs in the types of work that they do. And so it makes sense that different personality types might gravitate towards, say, these different product management roles. Let's talk a little bit about that right now. First, the internal product manager. Due to the fact that you're building tools and products for people within your own company and your stakeholder's all internal, this type of role is great for people that might be starting out in the role of product management. This role also allows you to learn a lot about technology because usually you'll be making tools that integrate with other internal systems or third party tools like marketing software, CRMs, that sort of thing. Any internal product management role, you'll be doing a lot of project management and you'll have a lot less risk of losing the company big money if you make a mistake or a feature is buggy. This is because you're not building for millions, you're building only for the people that you work with, people in marketing and sales and these types of departments. Now how about the business to business or software as a service project manager? Just like the internal product manager, this is also a good introduction role to the role of product management. Part of this is because you usually have a much, much smaller number of users to build for, not as few as the internal tools role, but much less than the consumer product manager role. This is because business to business companies are usually selling pretty expensive software to only several hundreds or thousands of companies and not millions or tens of millions of users around the world. This type of product role lets you be a little bit more flexible and creative in how you build things, but not necessarily as flexible on what you're building, because often times priorities are weighted heavily by the sales team and how much money a certain feature will bring in. You'll also probably be building on tighter deadlines because sales deals often have deadlines associated with them. Both this role and the internal product manager role have a higher likelihood of you being responsible for a product or a feature on one or very few platforms, which is unlike the next role. So our third one, the B to C, or business to consumer product management role. This is a role that is good for people who don't mind uncertainty and a lot of pressure. It is one of the most challenging product roles in the product management world because you're often building for millions of users and usually have the product on multiple platforms, like web, IOS, and Android. You can also lose the company a lot of money if something breaks, so if you and your team release a feature that is full of bugs and it causes tens of thousands of users to lose time on the app or not be able to use it until you update it in the next release cycle, that is some big problems. On top of these pressures, you have to do extensive user testing, you have to continually look over feedback from users and it's never quite certain what you should build next. You have to iterate and test in a very agile way to get the features that you need to build. Like I said, the business to consumer product role is not an easy one, but then again, it is one where you will learn a lot. And because you're building on multiple platforms like I mentioned, you're going to learn about all sorts of stuff from web development all the way to mobile development. All right everyone, I'll see you in the next lecture.

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