Charting Your Career as a PM: Specialisation or Generalisation?

A defence of the generalist product manager in an increasingly specialised field.

Read this article for joy and/or as preparation for our upcoming event!

There’s a running joke that if someone asks a Product Manager what they do at a party they are lost for words. As they attempt to explain, they only bring the person that’s making polite conversation into further confusion; ‘Oh so you write code!’, ‘No…’, ‘ahhh you’re the CEO…’ ‘No…’, ‘Ah you’re a researcher…’. Maybe we’re just bad in social situations or this is indicative of the breadth of interpretations for the role of product manager. It’s probably a bit of both. 

Product has become a popular but poorly understood field because it can be all things to all people. It is varied by its nature. Add to this our human desire to put things in boxes, our tendency to jump on a new trend bandwagon and a need to differentiate ourselves on LinkedIn as product becomes an ever more popular discipline, and we arrive at the ‘specialist PM’. Here we explore the value of some of the most common speciality PM roles and offer our view on how to navigate them when thinking about career development.

Skillset Specialisation 

Examples: Technical PM, Data PM, Platform PM

We see technical skillset specialisation as the most valid specialisation. Sometimes, a deeply technical product requires a technical product manager, or a suite of data products requires someone who has a well-practised understanding about how to productise data. Being able to speak the language of your users matters so you can understand the kinds of problems they are facing. You need to understand enough to ideate effectively. Imagine one of your users says “I have a tight upgrade window in this air-gapped environment”. As a TPM you should be able to identify some key feature needs: quick resolution of build failures, keeping the size of the upgrade small, rollback ability. 

Without technical expertise on a technical product there is a risk you shift into only doing project management. For example, making sure the engineering leads get in the right meetings and translate what they’re building into plans. You can ask if it’s valuable to the users but you really just have to take them at their word. This could hinder your product career growth. 

Technology Specialisation 

Examples: AI PM, Blockchain PM. 

We’ve all been there. You’ve just finished presenting research from discovery about the problems your users are facing, and an executive who appeared to be checking their emails throughout your presentation pipes up with a question: “how do you think we can use AI?” Boom. There goes your painstakingly crafted problem statements and in comes the latest hype technology. 

A core principle of product management is to focus (at least initially) on problems and not solutions. A technology in your job title implies you already have part of the solution. This might limit the scope and variety of problems you’re able to tackle in your role and prevent you from building valuable experience. This type of specialisation could also damage your career longevity. If you brand yourself too heavily in any one area, and then that area falls out of fashion, you’ll find your options limited. Ask the blockchain specialists who are having a harder time right now! AI is likely an exception to this point, and there may be valid examples where ‘AI PM’ actually signals the need for deep data skills and experience building LLMs. As a general rule, however, we advise against pigeon-holing yourself into a specific technology early in your career.

Industry Specialisation

Examples: FinTech PM, EdTech PM, HealthTech PM 

Specialisation in a certain industry often roots from a passion or deep interest in an area. Having passion for what you do at work means you’ll enjoy it more, you’ll be more committed, and ultimately better at your role. So, if you’re passionate about an industry and you know that’s where you want to work, go for it. We have three points of caution to consider as you do it. 

First off, working across multiple industries will help you learn and hone your PM craft. You’ll face different sized and shaped problems with different contexts which require you to apply your skills in new ways. Secondly, make sure you don’t lose your ability to “think like an outsider”. If you’ve spent 20 years focused on a specific kind of trading, you’ll need to invest a lot of effort to identify valuable disruption opportunities and avoid getting stuck in the realm of incremental gains. Thirdly, consider your career aspirations and whether the size of your chosen industry will let you achieve them. If you want to be a CPO one day, are there enough of those opportunities available? It is likely better to prioritise building experience (and a network) across multiple industries to increase your chances of bagging a senior role later.

None of this is to say that as a generalist PM you shouldn’t prioritise building domain knowledge for your given product. It is absolutely key to building stakeholder relationships, identifying competitor trends and setting strategy. Building domain knowledge quickly is a skill you can hone, and shoutout to Gala for sharing tips for this in a past Product Breaks article. 

Product Lifecycle Specialisation

Examples: Growth PM, Strategy PM

The challenging variety of the PM role might be where titles such as ‘growth PM’ have come from. It helps a company to reduce the scope of the role and perhaps gives them some security in the outcome they can expect from the role holder. If it’s in their job title, they must deliver it. 

The problem with these types of specialisation is that they show a fundamental lack of understanding of the product craft. As a PM, your ultimate role is to deliver value for your customers and your business, and your focus should be on whatever it is that’s going to deliver that value. From aligning stakeholders on vision and strategy, to thinking about how to grow your product, to ideating features and triaging and tackling bugs, you’ll do whatever is going to help your product deliver against its key metrics. Specialisms like these could suggest that you’re doing a product role in a non-product organisation. If growth has historically been seen as the role of marketing, and strategy as the role of the strategy team, then it may be necessary to specify these disciplines in the PM job title. This organisation needs to understand that all product managers are growth PMs, and all are strategy PMs. By all means build these skills, but don’t see them as a specialism.

In Conclusion

We think the beauty of product management as a career is in the multidisciplinary variety. Brendan Chu, previous VP of Product at Shopify, summed this up nicely: “A product manager’s multidisciplinary awareness enables them to communicate in whatever language is necessary to effectively deliver information across the team.” 

Chu describes product managers as APIs, facilitating communication between multiple disciplines and ensuring that results in good decisions. To do this well, you may need to build specialist technical skills and you’ll absolutely need domain knowledge. But our advice is to be conscious about how some of these specialisations might impact your career and make deliberate choices to avoid limiting yourself later. Sure, adding AI at the start of our job title might make you a bit more money in the short term, but you might be worse off in the long run.

---

Join us to discuss further on March 7th!

---