What’s the difference between a product manager and a product generalist?
The first in a new hWD series on generalist vs. specialist hires. This week? Product
Large companies engage in what product leader and founder of Silicon Valley Product Group Marty Cagan calls “product management theater”- a product team of feature builders with odd titles lacking the real core competencies of the product manager role found in the elite product orgs early stage founders dream to build. Often these teams miss the mark on structuring a great product team and realizing the true function of a product manager. And in the nascent days of your startup when your organization looks much more like a network than a hierarchical structure, the makeup of a large company's product team is a misleading example to follow. It's easy to overlook the breadth of impact a product role can have at an early stage. In most early teams, product managers are lone wolves in their orgs, acting as product leader, product operator, and project manager all at the same time.
But when launching your startup, you can go one step broader, and often hiring a product generalist in lieu of a product manager is the true unlock for founders struggling to get their product from 0-1. At its core, “the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Generalist is the difference between having a roadmap versus having a guide for exploring uncharted territories”, says Sophia Fleming, oAT lead generalist. “A Product Manager follows the agile development playbook, while a Product Generalist is a conductor orchestrating a symphony of strategies and shifting processes.”
Reframing product hiring in the early days
Founders are often cautious about hiring product managers too early in the startup journey -- and they should be. For idea-stage, pre-product, or early-product founders who haven’t achieved product-market fit, there will likely be unnecessary complexity in decision-making given that the founder is the primary driver of product direction. If the CEO/founders are taking responsibility for the product management (the value and viability of what is to be built), then the product hire is either building out the roadmap features and projects or acting as the conduit to the engineers; both scenarios often lead to an overpaid project manager who is not actually overseeing the function of product management.
For founders who don’t have direct product management skills or experience, and are also responsible for leading many more functions of an early org, a product generalist can not only fit product management skills that might be missing on the team as well as other essential core competencies around GTM, like marketing, sales and customer success.
Product expert Lenny Rachitsky recently did a deep dive into hiring early teams and found that PMs made up only 5% of the first three hires. However, PMs, growth, sales, and customer success, made up >20% collectively. An alternative to hiring a specialized PM early could be hiring a product generalist to cover GTM/growth, sales, and customer success, filling in the gaps in more than one function to extend the impact of their work. Hiring a product generalist can be a forward-thinking way to get further faster.
The Product Manager
It’s common to misinterpret the role of a product manager as a project manager says Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group). A product manager is responsible for customer value and viability for the business, focused on outcomes, “a creator -- not a facilitator” says Cagan. To do the job well, a product manager role is a project manager role, but it’s not the full job. An empowered product manager is given a problem to solve and the measure of success is solving the problem. Strong product companies don’t get points for shipping, but rather for delivering the outcome. “It’s about time to money, not time to market.”
You can also think about product management in terms of business outcomes. In Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, Teresa Torres measures the definition in levers. “A business outcome measures how well the business is progressing. A product outcome measures how well the product is moving the business forward. A traction metric measures usage of a specific feature or workflow in the product.”
“Product managers serve as a level-up for product development, individuals who are generally ready to step in after PMF is achieved. They focus on efficiently navigating the stages of development, launching changes, and hitting business OKRs with surgical precision. They thrive with well-defined areas of ownership”, says Sophia.
With the lens of product value and business viability, some areas a Product Manager might own include:
Sprint Planning
Roadmapping
Requirement Gathering
User Interviews
OKR-setting for the Product
Aligning cross-functional teams (marketing, sales, customer success, and leadership) through product outcomes
The Product Generalist
A Product Generalist is an adaptable trailblazer, wielding a versatile toolkit of frameworks, prepared to pick up and drop them as needed. They foster relationships, introduce new frameworks, and ensure operational efficiency. A product generalist can help early-stage teams begin to iterate and document the ways a startup will work, with an operator mindset that brings in actual work they are doing in adjacent functions. This, crucially, will help a Product Generalist support product leadership, by defining a product and when a product manager can step in at the right time while focusing on what problems to solve, how to solve these problems, and how the team will build, test and deploy product solutions. At the same time, as the company grows, a Product Generalist will ease the onboarding burden of a PM hire to support them as part of a growing org while also unlocking them by running interference with people ops, GTM, research, etc.
In many instances in the early days, product managers step into companies without clear business direction, or with strong team operating rhythms that have grown out of afounder personal habits. A great product generalist can (and should!) own projects and work streams adjacent to the traditional realms of product, as they are complementary to the work they do and the insights that come only from someone who is the product owner. Product generalists extend their influence to GTM strategy, company operations, hiring strategies, and areas that demand problem-solving finesse. Their impact is measured not just by business metrics but also by team health, collaboration clarity, and operational effectiveness. While a product manager creates value and viability for the product, a product generalist additionally creates value and viability for the systems building that product.
With the lens of creating value and viability for the systems building that product, some areas a Product Generalist might own:
In addition to those of a traditional PM
Early GTM
Experimenting with outreach emails and growth hacks
Fundraising deck construction
Early sales experimentation
Process development transitioning from founder-led sales
Marketing event planning
Customer success processes for customer onboarding and retention
Design Partner Program development
Staffing plans to support product development
Company-wide OKR planning
Product Marketing strategy and execution
Founder thought partnership and support
who You Need
In an excerpt from Lenny’s research experiment on startups that hired a true product manager within their first three hires, Guy Podjarny, founder and CEO of Snyk, explained:
‘I believed the fact that security products weren’t fit for developers was a product problem, not a tech problem, needing breakthroughs more in the UX world than tech algorithms. Furthermore, I had two technical co-founders that I knew would lead the security and tech aspects well, so felt I’m well-covered there. I could have done the product work myself (and in practice, I did a portion of it), but I wanted to free myself up to build the company as a whole, and not be too focused on one aspect of it. I did hire someone with deep UX skills, better than mine, who complemented me, not just offloaded work.”
Conversely, the product generalist acted as the first hire for startup founder Rick Song of Persona:
“Here’s (the) founder and CEO of Persona, on hiring a PM as employee #1: ‘Vincent [Tsao] was someone I knew well, knew I’d work well with, and respected immensely. He was also someone who I knew wasn’t fixated on a title/role and would just do everything (seriously lol his first task was setting up our payroll so he could pay himself). This probably is 80% of the reason.
I think a lot of early teams undervalue the importance of processes around product development. Obviously, product/market intuition is the most important, but getting a strong foundation for how you develop/document/rollout is so key too... and often times is an afterthought. Charles and I were both awful at process, and we knew we needed someone to really help us all coordinate and stay on track, especially when we were building something rather complex as our first iteration for our product.’
TLDR
You can assess the need for your early org in how each profile approaches their work, measures impact, and solves problems.
Approaching Work:
Product Manager
A product specialist will be primarily focused on how to support their business OKRs. They approach the work methodically, concerned with team morale and operations only insofar as it is needed to further their business goals.
Product Generalist
A product generalist is focused on what the team needs to succeed in their product development goals: which relationships need strengthening, which frameworks should be introduced, and which tools might be valuable. They may be managing projects or workstreams in marketing, sales, operations, or other functions to better build out the product function.
Measuring Impact:
Product Manager
The product specialist is aligned to the OKRs for their area of the product: any work they do or facilitate should result in a change in a business metric.
Product Generalist
A product generalist may align with OKRs as well — but they are keen to make sure the team they are working with is efficient and clear in their direction. They measure impact by team health measures, operational efficiency, and communication clarity, as well.
Solving Problems:
Product Manager
A product manager is likely focused on the stages of product development and moving efficiently to launching changes and measuring the impact of those changes. They solve problems using the tools of agile development: sprint planning, product speccing, road mapping, and writing strategy documentation.
Product Generalist
A product generalist is flexible: they are solving problems as they arise, in areas that might extend beyond agile development: they will have an eye on operations and team collaboration, and might also extend some of their focus areas to be outside the realm of what is traditionally product. For example, they might have a stronger role in GTM strategy or overall company operations, in addition to supporting those on product development.
Before you go
Understanding the nuances between these roles is essential for founders navigating the complexities of early-stage product development. By reframing product hiring strategies and considering the broader impact of a product generalist, startups can leverage diverse skill sets to accelerate growth and innovation. As you chart your startup journey, remember to assess your organization's needs and align your hiring strategy accordingly; there are often newer -- and better -- ways to build teams.
Writer: Britt