The Product Manager’s Career Path: A Guide for Storytellers

Table of Contents

• Product Storytelling Career Paths:
• What is a Market Analyst?
• What is a Product Analyst?
• What is an External Product Manager or Product Owner?
• What is an Infrastructure Product Manager?
• What is an Internal Product Manager or Integration Owner?
• What is a Project Manager?
• What is a Program Manager?
• There you have it
Product Manager, Product Owner, Product Analysts, Program Manager, Project Manager... There are many ways that companies, especially software companies, describe the roles known as “Product.”  Let’s call all of these roles ‘Product people’ for the purpose of this post. There are senior versions of each of these roles, and you may also move laterally across roles to try something different. For all roles, storytelling is very important. That’s because all roles in the product organization work with a large range of stakeholders. In the product world, being able to utilize storytelling skills is the quickest way to build influence and move up the product ladder. Storytelling is the ability to leverage your industry knowledge and personal experiences to influence and effectively communicate ideas, data, and problem-solving. That’s why I am going to break down some product storytelling career paths you can take.
Product people come from all walks of life. Whatever your background, you can pair with strong storytelling skills to become a product person. Experience in engineering, marketing, design and sales, and increasingly, data science, are all great segways into product management. Many skills are required of Product people, thus having a strong starting point in one of those fields can only help you accelerate your impact. If you’re new to the Product role you may find it harder to land a role because employers always want someone who has “done the job before.” But with good storytelling skills, you can position yourself to become a Product person.
This post helps you sort out the alphabet soup of titles out there, and the actual work expected of those roles. All of the roles below are interrelated from a work perspective and often report to a Head of Product.

Product Storytelling Career Paths:

What is a Market Analyst?

A Market Analyst in a Product team is often given a research question such as “What is the market size of people who like to surf with their dogs?” or “What is the share of wallet for a family's childcare needs in different countries?”. The result of this research helps the team figure out where to find potential customers, the potential for a given product, and where to invest product development resources.
Market Analysts need great communication skills and storytelling presence. Market Analysts tell stories with the data they collect. Through the stories, they help their teams understand the market landscape and effectively allocate resources.

What is a Product Analyst?

A Product Analyst is likely to find answers to questions such as “What % of the users in our product view this particular screen?” “What are the top 10 actions after they view this screen?” This is critical to keep track of product traction and figure out where to invest to improve the product.
Both Market and Product analysts are often entry-level roles. In smaller companies, this role may not exist, and the Product Manager will assume the responsibility for at least the Product Analyst, and sometimes the Market Analyst as well.
In larger companies, the Analyst role is often the stepping stone to a Product Manager or Strategy role. Senior Analyst is another career path in companies where research is central to the product offering. In companies where there is a large data team, the analyst career path can also intersect with the data science career path. In that case, a technical background and ability to write SQL and manipulate data are very beneficial.
As more and more data is being tracked and expected to be used to contribute to product decisions, Product Analyst is a growing specialty within the Product Organization.
Like Marketing Analysts, great Product Analysts have a keen eye for detail, understand trends, and utilize storytelling skills to communicate their findings.

What is an External Product Manager or Product Owner?

This is the role most people think about when they say Product Manager. This role is responsible for gathering market research, user requirements and making decisions about the roadmap, aka, what gets built next. The product manager spends the majority of his/her time understanding the customer’s perspective and market forces to direct the team toward the right things to build.
The External facing PM typically has a peer team of engineers and designers. For more technical products such as APIs, you may have a technical writer on the team. For products in the growth phase, you may also see marketing and data scientists on the same team. None of these people report to the PM, but the PM is the team leader, orchestrating decisions, and motivating the team forward towards continuous product-market-fit.
As team leaders, Product Managers need to be influential storytellers who get executives and stakeholders on board, while rallying their teams with clear communication.
For a more in-depth look at the career ladder for a Product Manager, check out Kwan’s Hierarchy of Product needs.

What is an Infrastructure Product Manager?

Infrastructure Product Managers build services, often in the form of APIs, to support the roadmaps of customer-facing products. This role is common for larger companies. For example, Acme may have several enterprise workflow management products, and all those products build their own text editor. The Infrastructure PM may then build the common text editor that is used across all products at Acme.
Infrastructure Product Managers need to communicate with a lot of different teams across the organization. As such, Infrastructure Product Managers must be master storytellers, especially with their own team.
Sometimes, this role is fulfilled by a tech lead who is unifying the services. On occasion, the role’s title is Program Management.

What is an Internal Product Manager or Integration Owner?

Two types of Product Managers that are worth distinguishing because the nature of the work is very different. One is the external-facing Product Manager who builds a roadmap that serves the company’s product users. The other is an Internal Product Owner, Internal Product Manager, who builds a roadmap to serve either the company’s employees or in the case of the Infrastructure PM mentioned above, the roadmaps of the external PMs. Let’s talk about the internal-facing PM who serves the company’s employees.
This role only appears in larger companies with at least 300 employees. Sometimes also called a Systems Analyst, this PM often reports to the IT organization. There are many tools deployed in an organization to support the work of the team. In 2020, organizations worldwide were using an average amount of 80 software as a service (SaaS) applications (Statista, 2020).
How these tools work together is part of a company’s secret sauce. So an internal-facing PM is hired to manage the user experience of the company’s employees in relation to these tools. As an internal PM, the work is the same in that you interview customers. But in this case, your customers are fellow employees. You observe their work and write specifications to improve the products that they use. Sometimes this takes the form of product configurations, often it takes the form of customizing integrations and manipulation of data. In larger companies, you may co-create or influence the roadmap of the tool provider’s company.
Just like the external PM, the internal PM leads a scrum team with engineers and designers to realize his vision. However, most of the features built by this team would be custom to the company. Technical capabilities are often necessary for this internal PM to be successful. This means this is a great way for an engineer to transition into PM, by working first as an internal PM then moving towards an external PM if that’s desirable. In rare cases and very large companies, the software built here becomes a possible stand-alone product that other companies can use. In this case, a team is spun out to create a version of the product for the wider market.
If you enjoy workflow optimization, working with internal instead of external customers, the internal PM may be a good fit for you.
Internal PMs can transition to become External PMs. The skills gained in user research, pattern identification, writing specifications, and working with engineering to realize a vision are common. However, since the product that is built internally is custom to one company, the output is often more like a service than a product. Thus the skill gaps between an internal PM and an external PM may include market research, writing product-market-fit product specifications, growth planning, and external product launches.
With the internal PM existing only in bigger companies, storytelling skills are extremely important to the success of this role. Internal Product Managers or Product Owners must be comfortable with their storytelling type and capable of effectively communicating well with other storytelling types as well.

What is a Project Manager?

Project managers plan, organize and direct the completion of specific projects for an organization while ensuring these projects are on time, on budget, and within scope.
Project Management is a well-established discipline because co-ordination heavy industries such as construction, manufacturing, and IT infrastructure have built an established practice for project management. There are certifications such as PMP and CAPM and Agile practices are also incorporated.
In agile teams, the role of traditional project managers has mostly vanished. Scrum masters, in some ways, take over the plan, track, and manage scrum team activities.
For software teams, a new breed of “project managers” are typically hired when there are at least 3-4 Product Managers already on the team. They are often called TPMs (technical project managers, or technical program managers). Before that, either the Product Manager or the Technical Lead handles the project management duties. That’s because for small teams, adding another team member may slow down the team. But when the number of initiatives starts to grow it becomes a Tetris puzzle in planning, aligning, resourcing, and tracking. Having a dedicated TPM  is more efficient. The TPM  solves the Tetris puzzle by managing dependencies, the reporting up of schedules, and downstream impact due to changes.
While the Product Manager answers the Why and What questions regarding the roadmap, the TPM answers the When and Who questions regarding the roadmap.
Project managers with experience become program or portfolio managers, who manage multiple related projects and align projects to an organization's strategy.
Much like Product Managers, the Project Manager or TPM is responsible for communicating and facilitating clarity within the organization. As such, strong storytelling skills are a must for this role, especially the ability to simplify complex stories.

What is a Program Manager?

Program managers oversee the fulfillment of larger organizational goals following certain agreed-upon strategies. They work across multiple projects to ensure they align with company strategy but often do not directly manage those projects. Instead, Program Managers look at all programs in the company as a portfolio and inform the C-suite with details on program strategy, project delegation, and program implementation. It may be worthwhile to call out that programs are often called initiatives.
Program Managers are found in large companies, often with over 500 employees. At this point, the company has many product areas, dependencies, programs, and investment pathways to manage. Program Managers often work as peers to Product Managers. A group of Program Managers may form a PMO - Program Management Office that reports directly into the executive functions, e.g. CPO, CTO, or COO.
As a Program Manager, the storytelling skills that are most beneficial to this role are assessing the audience and adapting the story. A Program Manager must be able to understand projects they do not directly lead and be able to communicate about them effectively to stakeholders.

There you have it

Product Manager, Product Owner, Program Manager, Product Analysts, and Project Managers all work together to build and execute a roadmap. Although the titles used at each company differ, you can now see how the roles work in tandem and all the possible product storytelling career paths you can take.
For all roles, storytelling plays a key part in the role’s success. You will find as you jump into the world of product that every role emphasizes a different storytelling discipline. However, the entire storytelling toolbox of listening, communicating, and delegating are all utilized in every role. As you wish to move up the ladder, you’ll find that storytelling abilities can help you greatly. That’s because storytelling builds your influence and ability to work effectively across teams.
Want to build a successful career in product?  Take a Storytelling class to build your influence skills.