Discussing the nomenclature of positions is important, but it is necessary to be careful and critical when doing so.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “end of the Product Manager role at Airbnb” and more recently we had a change involving Product Marketing Managers at Nubank.
The problem is that I'm seeing the product community being very eager on these topics. People are getting anxious when they see changes in roles, wondering how they should position themselves, as well as people getting into discussions without much basis and sometimes inflaming this topic even more. Because of this, I decided to bring a slightly more down-to-earth point of view.
Product area positions
The truth is that job titles will change frequently, and each company will end up creating its own terminology. But that doesn’t eliminate the need for an industry standard. We will always afghanistan mobile phone number need someone to be the middle ground between technology and business – whether it’s a Product Manager, a Business Manager, or whatever name we come up with.
In the product area, variations have already emerged: we have the standard Product Manager, the Growth Product Manager with a greater focus on growth; Data Product Manager focused on data products; Technical Product Manager for technical products such as APIs that serve software engineers. Regardless of the specific title given to the position, they are all Product Managers.
This trend of giving specific names to professionals' roles occurs in all areas (UX, Marketing, etc.). People are so anxious that I have even received questions about whether there was a trend in this nomenclature.
I believe the only trend is that names will always be adapting and we need to know not to panic when this happens. That said, I believe we are far from drastic changes in product nomenclature and people's attributions .
The case of Airbnb
We can’t inflame these issues based on a single company or a single piece of news without context, as happened with Airbnb merging PM with PMM. This worked well for them, but who can guarantee that it will be the same for all companies?
Basecamp is a 100% remote company and they recently moved away from Cloud servers and back to On Premise , so now do you think everyone will stop using Cloud because they are a reference company? And everyone will go remote? I won't even comment. All of this is very contextual and specific. The same goes for job titles.
In Airbnb's case, the change occurred during the pandemic, at a time of crisis, when they created a single roadmap and the CEO centralized all decisions. In this situation, it made sense to unify PMs and PMMs.
And stop and think: this is nothing new . I've actually seen this for many years, where companies don't have a Product Marketing Manager , so the PM ends up taking on this PMM role.
The Nubank case
Recently, there was also the case of the change in the name of Product Marketers to Brand Manager at Nubank. This has already generated yet another buzz. And do you know what's worse? The change was simple. They basically unified Brand Managers and PMMs into the role of Marketing Managers (i.e. PMMs).
It is worth mentioning that during my time there, it was difficult to understand the difference between the Brand Manager and PMM roles, and there were several discussions – just as we still get into the nonsense of discussing PO versus PM today. The unification seems to make a lot of sense for their context, but there will probably be some people focused more on Branding and others more on Product Marketing depending on the context – the same would happen with a PM who may be more allocated to a data product, for example.
When I was there, I worked with a Brand Manager, but she did more Product Marketing than Branding. This only reinforces that the most important thing is the result you are causing in the business, the impact you are generating.
The importance of the position
I know that we often think about the job title because we think about our career, how we position ourselves, what we will put on LinkedIn, how recruiters will find us and so on – and all this makes a lot of sense. But here is the solution: If you are a person who is more suited to technical products, put Technical PM. If you are a person who has more experience in Data, put Data Product Manager and so on. In the end, know that you will be a Product Manager – and no, you will not have to know everything.
I've been a Tech PM, Growth PM, Data PM and 'normal' PM. I made a point of always leaving Product Manager as I didn't want to limit myself to one context. I only detailed my products in the description. But that was my choice. If you prefer to niche down, that's fine too.
In each company, and sometimes even in the same company, you will need to have different skills depending on the context of your team and product. In places where the PM ends up accumulating functions, such as Prod. Marketing responsibilities, you will probably need to choose which roles should fall because it is humanly impossible to manage a product and execute good GTM, positioning, pricing, etc. So, yes, it is important to have specialists, and if the company can budget for this, even better.
Imagine that you have listed all the necessary tasks and grouped them into a job description. In a specific company, a certain task may be the responsibility of the Product Marketing Manager; in another, the Product Manager; or even the Business Analyst. However, in the end, the responsibility for this task remains, as does the need for someone to be in the middle between business and technology. If we focus more on tasks than on positions, everything becomes clearer. We will understand that the needs are almost identical across companies, regardless of who performs them.
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