Not all PMs are built the same.
You could meet two “Product Managers” and they’d be doing completely different jobs.
Here’s what most people miss:
PM is not a job. It’s a genre.
Let me break it down.
12 flavors of PM
Pick your fighter:
- Technical PM — fluent in dev talk, thrives on APIs and system design
- Growth PM — lives in dashboards, A/B tests everything
- AI/ML PM — trains models, wrangles data, and deals with hallucinations
- Data PM — builds tools for insights and analytics
- UX PM — obsessed with smooth flows and pixel-perfect UI
- Core PM — owns the stuff that can’t break (login, payments, etc.)
- Platform PM — builds for the builders (infra, SDKs, internal tooling)
- Mobile PM — ships for iOS/Android, knows how to fight Apple guidelines
- Hardware PM — juggles firmware, factories, and feature freezes
- Consumer PM — thinks in dopamine, loops, and viral triggers
- B2B PM — lives in demos, stakeholder calls, and legal reviews
- E-comm PM — owns the cart, the click, the chaos
Same title.
Different muscles.
Totally different day-to-day.
That’s why asking “How do I become a PM?” is like asking “How do I become a chef?”
Well… what kind of food do you want to cook?
Start with the type. Then build the skills.
Which type of PM are you, or want to be?