Product Manager Job Titles and Hierarchy

There’s a lot of confusion around product management job titles, seniority, and hierarchy. This makes it hard to compare jobs, plan your career, and attract the right talent to your team. In this post, I’ll walk through the Product Manager levels, providing overviews for each product role, and some useful content to refer to.

A standard is emerging from most successful product teams and organizations that can serve as a template for your own. Let’s take a look.

Associate Product Manager

This is an entry-level product position, for someone who is brand new to the role. It also has a specific connotation with an Associate Product Manager (APM) program. This is a common rotational apprenticeship program in larger companies like Google and Facebook. The typical APM is a recent graduate. The aim – similar to most apprenticeships – is to develop these candidates into full-time positions through a combination of training and hands-on involvement with real projects.

Junior Product Manager

A Junior Product Manager is also new to the role but doesn’t require as much hands-on training as an Associate Product Manager. They operate independently with a product development team, maybe on a smaller product or area, and under the leadership and mentorship of a more senior product manager. A Junior Product Manager typically has some work experience under their belt already and can come from any background. Engineering, design, or business are the most common backgrounds. Some of the best product managers out there have come from customer support, quality assurance, or business analyst roles.

Lead Product Manager

This is a newer role, and usually a very senior Product Manager who is responsible for a critical product in the company. This can be equivalent in rank to a Senior Product Manager through to a Vice President Product. The difference is they are not managing other Product Managers at all – they are simply exceptional Product Managers who want to stay hands-on and leave people management to others.

In many ways, this is similar to the Architect track in engineering (in contrast to the Chief Technology Officer track), and something we should encourage more. Just because you’re a great product manager and want to advance in your career, it doesn’t mean you should have to move away from being a hands-on product manager to a leader of other product managers. Some people are just better suited to one path than the other. Recognizing who is great at leadership and who is great at building amazing products is equally important and valuable to an organization.

Product Director / Group Product Manager

A Product Director or Group Product Manager is where the role starts to change. It goes from an individual contributor who owns a product and works hands-on with engineering and design teams, to someone who has stepped back from the day-to-day to focus on leading other Product Managers and working on alignment. This is where soft skills around people management become a critical part of the job – managing people is even harder than managing products!

Vice President Product / Head of Product

This is similar to a Director, but common in larger companies with more products and management layers, or as the most senior product person in a start-up. This role is all about managing other product managers. Additionally, a Vice President will usually be responsible for managing a team budget — some organizations even throw in P&L (Profit & Loss) responsibility. In many start-ups, this is called a Head of Product but I’m not personally a fan of that title as there’s no way to promote a Head of Product – they’re already the Head!

CPO / Chief Product Officer

A Chief Product Officer (CPO) is the most senior product person in an organization. They usually manage more than one team of Product Managers and represent products in the C-suite or management team. They’re responsible for overall product strategy and alignment within their teams and with other parts of the organization.

The difference between a Vice President Product and Chief Product Officer in smaller companies isn’t huge, and the title is used interchangeably for the most senior product person in the company. But in larger organizations that have both roles, we can again borrow from our engineering friends to clarify the difference. The Vice President Product is responsible for the team, the processes, and getting things done, while the Chief Product Officer is responsible for the product vision, product architecture, and overall organizational alignment.

One size does not fit all

Most companies don’t need all these tiers of course, so it’s important to think about how this fits into your organization. At a start-up, you might have a single Product Manager. As you grow, a couple of Product Managers could report to a Head of Product or Vice President of Product. Only as the company grows and the suite of products grows do you need to consider more layers. As with anything else in the product, these team structures and tiers should be aligned with customer needs. This way, you can incentivize and organize teams in alignment with your company goals.

Product Owner ≠ Product Manager

Product Owner is a job role that came out of Agile and Scrum, and although many organizations use it as a job title that is interchangeable with Product Manager, it’s not correct. In Scrum, the Product Owner is defined as the person who is responsible for grooming the backlog. While in Agile it’s defined as the representative of the business, and neither entirely describe the full breadth of a Product Manager’s responsibilities.

Product Owner is a role you play in an Agile team, whereas a Product Manager is the job title of someone responsible for a product and its outcome on the customer and the business.

Now a lot of Product Owners out there are great Product Managers, and they should just change their title. But a fair number of Product Owners have simply completed a certified Scrum product owner course and now think they’re equivalent to a Product Manager. Doing so sets them up to fail as they never consider the broader role. So if you’re tasking a Product Owner with the broader product management responsibilities, make sure you provide the training they need to master the full breadth of the role (and then change their title).

Structure = Clarity

Having clear and common structures for product management job titles in our teams will help us all better understand our careers, roles, and teams. This structure should provide the right foundation for you and your teams to ask: Do your team’s titles accurately reflect their jobs? Are they clear enough that applicants looking at your open vacancies know what you’re hiring for and if the job is for them? Or do you need to rethink your structure to maximize clarity?