My ideal product management role
navigating varied product manager job opportunities 2025-09-23 #career
While looking for role as a product manager at a good company I have to reflect on what kind of role I want. Product teams in different companies practice product management so differently that this means figuring out what kind of product management. The industry, company, business model, and product type matter too.
Summary
I aim to find a senior product manager role, preferably embedded in a team working on customer-facing software, and working with a UX designer. Caring about the product and mission matters more to me than a B2C vs B2B market or business model.
Senior role
I’ll work best in a senior product manager role. After over two decades in tech, and as a product manager since 2018, I have enough experience to know how to do the job. How people work together matters more than whether I work with other product managers.
I enjoyed working with other product managers with a different background to mine at a scale-up, because of how we learned from each other; I have also enjoyed working as the only product manager at a start-up, where I could adopt and develop my own approach, without having to rely on someone guiding me.
Customer-facing software
I prefer to work on team that solves problems directly for customers, rather than building software for downstream developers. Owning a customer/user problem space matters more than whether it spans the whole product.
Product management works best when you work end-to-end, to create a learning feedback loop. This cycle goes from customer research, via discovery, design and strategy, to feature rollout. While platform teams may help manage software development complexity, they decouple the team and its product management from customers/users.
UX design
As a product manager, I’ve done my best work in collaboration with a UX designer. I’ve enjoyed this most when I’ve owned customer problems and project opportunities, and they’ve owned solution options and design direction. Just because one of us could do both, doesn’t mean that we should.
In the absence of a designer to work with, I have produced by own wireframes for developers. And I can inflate my sense of my user-interface design skills as much as any product manager, but also know not to.
Mission over B2C vs B2B
Mission-driven product companies in climate tech and sustainability, for example, exist for bother business customers and consumer markets. A product company’s mission and vision matter more to me than their business model, even though different business models correspond to different product management jobs.
Products vary in which markets and segments they serve, and working with business customers can feel very different to serving consumers. Moreover, B2C and B2B product teams have different collaborations with go-to-market teams. However, I have enjoyed both; mission comes first, business strategy follows.
Introductions welcome
If you know a company with a role like this, please introduce me 🚀
