Part 2: Which Type of Product Manager Are You?

A Follow-up FAQ to Product Manager Archetypes

Mar 19, 2024

Hi there, it’s Adam. I started this newsletter to provide a no-bullshit, guided approach to solving some of the hardest problems for people and companies. That includes Growth, Product, company building and parenting while working. Subscribe and never miss an issue. If you’re a parent or parenting-curious I’ve got a podcast on fatherhood and startups - check out Startup Dad. Questions you’d like to see me answer? Ask them here.

Q: I have questions about your PM Archetypes newsletter

A few weeks ago I published a newsletter on PM Archetypes and a corresponding LinkedIn post. The goal was to provide a set of skills and behaviors that helps a product manager determine the type of work they’ll be 1) good at and 2) enjoy. It’s also to help managers figure the same thing out for their team members: what are the skills and behaviors necessary for the type of work required and who might be best suited to do that work.

Well, the newsletter and the post got quite a bit of traction and engagement. They also got a lot of questions and sparked some really interesting discussion. So today I’m going to answer and address the top questions, statements and concerns. My goal is that pairing this follow-up with that newsletter will give you a helpful piece of the puzzle for actively managing your PM career or for those managers who are thinking through important staffing decisions.

Here are the top 11 questions, comments, and feedback I received:

What about the “startupper?” The person who is visionary, strategic, runs big and small experiments…
I’ve done all of these. What’s next?
How did you come up with these? How did you define them?
I can’t find my archetype, what do I do?
What if I’m X archetype but working in the wrong area?
These sound like “working styles” more than archetypes.
What do I do with these archetypes?
Where does a “fill-in-the-blank” PM fit with the archetypes?
What’s the difference between Optimizer and Growth?
What about AI/ML as an archetype?
What’s YOUR archetype, Adam?

As a reminder, here are the archetypes in a handy short-hand:

Q: What about the “Startupper?” This is the person who is a visionary, strategic, runs big and small experiments and generally does it all?

If I had to pick I’d say this is some combination of a White Spacer and a GM. But what you’re actually describing here is the classic startup generalist. There are plenty of people I’ve met who fit this description, but unfortunately this type of person isn’t usually that good at any one particular thing. You can keep operating in this mode and you’ll be an early stage startup person for your entire career. But if your company is growing you’ll eventually have to adapt.

I had this role at various points in time when I was at Lyft. Even though I’d spent 10 years working in Growth and Marketing prior to joining there was plenty of work needed at a fast-growing startup that didn’t fit neatly into one of those two boxes. I set up Lyft’s first customer service team, found us new real estate, started and led the team that onboarded drivers, designed the first driver interview process, etc. I didn’t have any formal training in any of these things, but I had some characteristics of the White Spacer (comfort with ambiguity) and GM (communication, P&L experience, hiring ability) that helped me be successful in those areas. Eventually I handed many of these responsibilities off to other people, teams, etc. which will happen to you too if you’re the “startupper.”

If you want to grow and push past the early-stage startup generalist label you’ll need to lean into skills and behaviors in one of the 7 archetypes.

Q: I’ve done all these, what’s next?

Let me start by saying: you haven’t. Stop fooling yourself. Even if you’ve done some things that look like all 7 of these you probably haven’t done all of them particularly well. As I tell people on my teams, doing something once doesn’t mean you’re an expert or even good at it.

Or as my grandfather used to say:

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The first thing I’d advise someone to do when they think they’ve “done it all” is to check their ego at the door. Give yourself a critical evaluation across two dimensions: 1) how well did the project or projects go that required the skills of that archetype and 2) did you actually enjoy doing the work? If you don’t think you can honestly evaluate that then ask for 360 feedback from your manager and others who worked with you. And if you don’t know how to ask for it, leverage a coach to help you.

The second part is probably even more important: did you enjoy the work? Even if something didn’t go perfectly (spoiler: it never does) you can always improve if you’re motivated to do so. I’m a lot less motivated to improve in areas that I don’t enjoy. And yes, it’s a privileged position to have complete agency over what you work on but even without that privilege you can have partial agency by seeking out those opportunities vs. waiting for someone to assign you to them.

Q: How did you come up with these? How do you define them?

There are 3-4 methods that have helped me come up with these archetypes. They are:

Observation.
Living through it as an IC.
Putting people in the right roles as a manager.
Putting people in the wrong roles as a manager.

As I mentioned in WTF is Strategy, one of the dirty secrets of strategy creation at a company is that it’s formed by repetition and observation. You have to study the problems, the landscape, the competition, and the trends in your industry and adjacent ones to shape strategy. Doing that for an extended period of time leads to breakthroughs. The same is true for defining these product manager archetypes.

I’ve worked at 10-11 different companies in my career as an IC, a manager, an executive, or an interim executive. I’ve worked on a lot of projects, with a lot of people, and seen a lot of successes and failures. When you do that for 20+ years you start to see some patterns emerge in how people work (including myself) and what drives success or failure on a piece of work. Trying to make sense of these patterns led to the 7 archetypes.

My own lived experience as an IC also shaped these. I’ve worked in some areas where the work felt effortless and enjoyable and the results were great. I’ve worked in some areas where the results weren’t great but the work still felt effortless and enjoyable. I knew that if I kept pursuing it the results would come. Growth work is like this for me. If you like the iteration, the data, the consumer psychology and the science of channel exploration then eventually you’ll find success working on Growth. White spacing work was the opposite for me for a long time. I used to hate the ambiguity, the lack of precision, and the difficulties in measurement. And I wasn’t particularly good at it. I still wouldn’t consider it a towering strength, but having done it several times I know how to identify those for whom it is.

On the managerial front you learn a lot through trial and error — putting people into roles where they excel and where they don’t. Seeing how the product manager job changes as a company grows and the work changes shape. And spending a lot of time talking to team members, sitting through retrospectives, and challenging myself to identify what went right and wrong.

The definition of the archetypes came from trying to find a MECE set of skills and behaviors that myself and people on my teams (or peers) have leveraged. Believe it or not but each of these archetypes maps to someone I’ve worked with at some point in my career (or myself).

Q: I can’t find my archetype, what do I do?

First, try harder. You probably map to one of these. If you want to get detailed on your individual competencies you can do a self evaluation using Ravi Mehta’s fantastic framework for PM competencies.

Second, go through your past work as a PM and identify all of the projects you worked on. Which ones were the most/least successful? Which ones did you most/least enjoy? Then identify the skills and behaviors you had to draw on that made it enjoyable, successful, miserable or unsuccessful. As you start to break the work down into its component parts you’ll likely identify some patterns. You can codify these using the competencies framework above.

Third, it’s possible that you just haven’t done enough work as a PM yet. In that case, put in some more time and then do the exercises above. If you look at the archetypes and know you want to be able to identify with one in particular then you’ve got to seek out opportunities that draw on those skills. Talk to your manager about it; the archetypes can give you a conversation starter.

Q: What if I’m “X” Archetype but working in the wrong area?

If you’re early in your career or at an early-stage company, give it some time before passing this judgment. Your role may change and new areas of opportunity can open. This is especially true if you’re at a company where you’re on the up escalator. Make it known that you think you’d be more successful working in a different area or on a different type of project. Bring evidence of your archetype and tell your manager you want to play to your strengths. If they agree then show them they made the right decision by doing great work.

If you’re on the down escalator then it might be time to get the hell out of there. You probably won’t have the opportunity to move into another area and you certainly won’t have the chance to do great work.

There’s a third approach here which is to try and build the skills necessary to turn the wrong area into the right one. You need to be on the up escalator for this and you need to be doing some work that you enjoy, but may not be good at yet.

Why might you choose to do this vs. moving into a new area? One is leadership potential. Most successful product leaders I know have the skills of multiple archetypes. This is helpful because as a leader you’ll be responsible for the topology of your team and putting the right people on the right projects. Understanding what it takes to get the job done (and get it done well) is best developed by doing the work. But again, this is an up escalator consideration because you’re going to need some practice (and forgiveness of your mistakes) to do well.

Q: These sound like “working styles” more than archetypes?

Less of a question than a statement, but let’s explore anyway. Archetypes contain certain ways of working and behaviors, but they are not exclusively defined by them. An archetype is a combination of skills and behaviors.

Let’s take Growth and White-spacer. Both require an iterative process / way of working. Both require some comfort with ambiguity (although more in white-spacer than growth). But the skills required are very different. For starters, a white spacer doesn’t need to be a channel expert or be incredibly quantitative. A growth archetype doesn’t need to be visionary.

Even though each shares some of the same behaviors they don’t share the same required skills. And you can use archetypes to assess the proper workstreams (projects) to put people on. But you wouldn’t say “my way of working is ‘technician.’”

Q: What do I do with these archetypes?

I hope this is more clear after the first 6 questions, but in case it’s not:

If you are an IC PM you can use these archetypes to self identify the work you enjoy doing and the work you’ll be most successful at based on your archetype today. You can then structure a plan to either do more of that work and/or build new skills to get better at it. And if you’re butting your head against the wall wondering why you’re not successful; a mismatched archetype could be the reason.

If you're a manager you can use this to identify the type of PMs you have in your organization, the type of work needed, and whether you have an imbalance in skills and behaviors relative to work needed. PM Archetypes provides a shorthand heuristic for this, but it’s not the end of the road. Once you’ve identified an imbalance you’ve got to shift your people, train them up, or bring in new ones.

Q: Where does a “fill-in-the-blank” PM fit into the archetypes?

I received a lot of questions about where a particular product specialization might fit within the archetype framework. My hypothesis is that this came from people who wanted to do the work in the job description of fill-in-the-blank-product-manager and wanted to see if they had the right skills and behaviors to do it OR they were already in that role, didn’t see it represented in any of the archetypes, and had a minor panic.

I’ll answer this in a few different ways. First, if you’re talking about platform services (auth, security, payments, etc.) then it’s likely some combination of internal and/or technician. The work will be highly technical in nature (think detailed product specs vs. briefs) and internal-facing. If you’re talking about a platform product for external customers (like developer tooling) then it’s likely some combination of technician and UX-inclined or technician and optimizer.

Second, if you’re doing great work and you love what you’re doing… Who cares? Archetypes are a tool, not a rule and you don’t have to overfit this framework. Now, you may be thinking about future career moves in which case the advice I gave above in “I can’t find my archetype” and “I’m working in the wrong area” is applicable here. Take the work you’re doing in your role that you (and others) identify as your strengths and passions, break it down into the skills required using the 12 competencies, and then using those competencies (and your own behaviors) you should be able to map yourself to a particular archetype.

Q: What’s the difference between Optimizer and Growth?

If you read through the two entries in the table above it becomes fairly apparent – an optimizer is fixated on the success and performance of a specific feature or product to make it as valuable as possible to customers. A growth archetype wants to take that valuable feature and bring it to as many customers as possible. There is some overlap in the techniques used—like the importance of iteration—but the product optimizer isn’t necessarily a channel expert whereas you’re more likely to see that in a growth archetype.

Q: What about AI/ML as an archetype?

In The Growing Specialization of Product Management, Keya and I said this about ML:

“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.”

I think there is a stark difference between a product specialization, like artificial intelligence or machine learning, and the package of skills and behaviors (archetype) that helps us identify whether someone would be great at that specialization. I prefer to not include specific technologies in the archetype framework because the idea is that this framework is long-lasting and durable beyond any emerging technology. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t have a “Web3 PM” archetype – although I suppose the behavior that would map to this is something like “speaks in code, like ‘gm’ and ‘wagmi.’”

But in all seriousness, if you zoom out from any particular technology you can ask yourself: how familiar and deep do I need to be in a “X technology” to be successful here. If the answer is “very” then you’re probably more of a Technician archetype. If your success in an area doesn’t require you to be a reformed engineer then the technician skills may not be all that important.

Final Q: What’s your archetype, Adam?

Great question! I think there are two that I identify very closely with: the General Manager (GM) and Growth (shocker, I know). I’m continuously working on my white spacer abilities, but there are still plenty of people who are way better at this than me. When I’m in GM or Growth mode I find that’s when I have boundless energy and feel like I could run through a wall. I’m capable of operating, at times, as those other archetypes but it can be draining and thus harder to sustain over the long term.

But the good news is that portfolio allocation and talent evaluation are one of the strengths of a GM. Over the course of my career I’ve learned how to find the right people for the task at hand when I feel completely out of my depth. And I’ve also had the opportunity to then learn from them and add to my skills.

Final Thoughts

Product work is quite multi-faceted and one of the questions I like to ask senior product managers and leaders I’m interviewing is to describe their career narrative in three acts.

The best answers to this question are those that approach it from the perspective of a defined archetype.

“This is the type of person I was, then I worked to become this type of person, and now I’m working on becoming this type.”

Or: “I’m this type of person and here’s how I’ve become the best at it across my career.”

And the best people I’ve ever worked with as a manager are those who have approached me with a sense of their own archetype.

“I’m doing this type of work, but I’m not sure I’m completely well-suited for it. I need to get better at X and Y or I need to go work in A and B areas instead.”

I’ve found archetypes to be an excellent conversation starter on career development, product portfolio management, and discussion of competencies/strengths/opportunities.

Hopefully this FAQ, coupled with the archetypes overview help you have those discussions with your manager or your team.