In my role as Product Scout for a news lab, I travelled to Scotland to attend the Design It Build It conference.
While there, Stephanie Szabó, Airbnb Head of Design Learning, talked about 4 types of product managers that she has come to know through her work.
The 4 Types of Product Manager
These types would be:
- The Tangible Prototyper
- The Hypothetical Explainer
- The Extreme Considerer
- The Learns by Doing
Out of interest for such an approach of classification, I compared myself to these types to see where I was leaning more. I visualized the assessment using a radar chart and a 6 point scale.
Taking my personal assessment as a basis, I have asked colleagues I have worked for about 10 years on various research and software projects to assess me. My goal was to figure out how my self-perception differs from what others see and notice while working side-by-side.
You can see the results of my personal assessment and that of my colleagues below. By the way, I would like to point out that apart from the more or less self-explanatory category titles, there was no further explanation of the types provided by me. Therefore, the categories may have been defined differently by the persons asked.
Results
As it seems, there are some shared opinions but also a clear blind-spot on my side which needs further investigation. It is interesting for me to note that the colleague I tend to work on research topics considers me much more deliberate (see dimension Extreme Considerer) than the colleague I develop software hands-on (see dimension Tangible Prototyper).
In this respect, I think all three assessments put together nicely indicate that I can use my different strengths, depending on my environment, quite flexible.
