Technical or GSD product manager find out who are you?
A lot of tech people have some overlap about what exactly a product manager does ?! And what is the difference between the titles of the product managers. I will try to explain the difference between titles of Product Manager in the technical field. The first will be Technical Product Manager and the second will be GSD Product Manager (Get Stuff Done). Attempt to explain the main difference and intersection between the two roles of the same function..
What are the main different points between them
Technical Product manager.
- Have deep technical back-ground in development or testing.
- Usually have working experience in tech field and shift to Product team.
- Focus on tech tasks (not coding), but have a deep eye on it.
- Working closely with tech team, suggest tech solution, validate tech execution .
- Have to know company tech stack and can improve it also.
- More close to product tech roadmap.
- Get more respect from tech team and enjoying the tech conversation.
- Usually working on cooperate.
- More focus on technical trends and find the best tech solution for problems.
- Focus on “How” features will be implemented
GSD Product Manager
- Main task to ship feature or product.
- Not required to have technical back-ground.
- Focus more in Strategy over all road-mapping.
- Working closely with many non-tech teams like sales, financial, UI/UX, testing, C-level.
- Usually working in Startups and in very high growing ones.
- Collect requirements, fighting for shipping.
- focus on cost during implementation.
- Very dynamic person.
- Monitoring market and see the competitors.
What are the common points between them.
- Both are working on delivering Product, one more technical focus and the other over all.
- Both are working on road-mapping.
- Both working on user stories/Epics and “What” feature most needed.
- Both are one team working together on daily bases.
- Both have research tasks and competitor analysis tasks form different point of view.
- Tech product manager help GSD product manger to communicate with tech team.
- Both priorities tasks feature and answer “What” “When” and “How”.
A product manager is the person responsible for developing a long-term strategy and shipping final product.
But once adding a Tech before the product manager’s role means you need someone with more technical skills and background experience in development.
In a personal opinion, the role of product management is still not well defined for many companies and in the technology industry in general. It is a very complex role and contains a lot of tasks and duty. Each company tries to pick up what it needs from these tasks and leave the others. It also depends on the corporate/startup structure.
So finally try not to confuse the inconsistency in product management role that you may encounter in your hands-on experience in tech field. They are all here to make the world a better place :)
Know more
- https://www.aha.io/blog/the-product-manager-vs-the-technical-product-manager
- https://hygger.io/blog/technical-product-managers-and-their-role-in-companies/
- https://www.mindtheproduct.com/technical-product-manager-anyway/
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