Building a Product Team That Scales with Your Company
Making sense of PM roles, responsibilities, and org design as you grow
To formulate and execute Product Strategy, you need the right Product Management organization in place.
One of the most common challenges I’ve observed among startup founders and CEOs is a lack of clarity around PM hierarchy, specializations, roles and responsibilities. This isn’t entirely unexpected—many founders haven’t worked within mature product organizations. Yet, it is vital to get this right, especially for startups that are beginning to scale because PM organization is the conduit through which decision making is delegated to frontline teams.
In this article, I’ll focus on the first building block of PM org design—understanding what different PM roles entail and how responsibilities are distributed. In subsequent posts, I’ll explain the principles of PM organizational design—specifically, what types of orgs deliver what kinds of outcomes, and the trade-offs involved.
The Two Parallel Tracks in Product Organizations
A mature Product organization typically includes two parallel growth tracks (see infographic):
Individual Contributor (IC) Product Managers
People Manager Product Managers
Both tracks are essential, but they serve distinct purposes.
IC PMs are responsible for execution—owning product outcomes, feature development, collaborating with engineering and design, managing sprints, and analyzing product usage data. Their day-to-day focus lies in delivering value through tangible product improvements.
People Manager PMs are focused on scaling product portfolios and platforms. They bring cross-functional cohesion in decision-making. They remove obstacles for product teams, invest and fine tune product systems and processes. They coach PMs, define product strategy tradeoffs, and ensure that execution remains aligned with business priorities. Their impact is less about shipping features and more about creating leverage through systems, frameworks, and culture.
As a founder or executive, it’s important to recognize that these are not hierarchical in a traditional sense—some of your most impactful IC PMs may not want to move into people management, and that’s perfectly valid. The key is to align structure with strengths.
Balancing Strategic Vision and Operational Execution
Another important distinction is between strategic and operational responsibilities across PM levels.
PMs at the top of the hierarchy are more strategic and focused on putting the systems in place to ensure high quality decisions that are aligned to the company strategy and goals. They are best positioned to drive decisions that involve trade-offs across functions—such as growth vs. retention or short-term revenue vs. long-term
Junior PMs at the bottom of the hierarchy are focused more on product outcomes and operations - owning the backlog, ensuring coordination with design and engineering, and driving feature releases.
Despite this distinction, it is vital to ensure everyone from top to the bottom are aware of strategic trade-offs, decision authority and have skin in the game.
Decision Types: Reversible vs. Irreversible
Jeff Bezos popularized the idea of Type 1 and Type 2 decisions, and it’s a useful mental model for Product organizations.
Type 1 decisions are irreversible or very costly to reverse. These include choices like entering a new market, restructuring your pricing model, or sunsetting a major feature. These decisions typically require knowledge of the long term implications and impact on other products and functions. Senior Product leaders with a lot of experience need to make these decisions
Type 2 decisions are reversible and lower-stakes—such as UI tweaks, copy changes, or A/B tests with limited exposure. These should be handled autonomously by frontline PMs to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks.
Product leaders need to educate their teams to recognize which type of decision they’re making—and equip them with the authority accordingly. This is one of the fastest ways to increase speed without sacrificing product value.
Generalists vs. Specialists: Making the Right Trade-Offs
This is where many startups get things wrong.
At the leadership level, it is critical to have generalist PMs—those who can operate across multiple product domains and collaborate effectively with functions like marketing, finance, sales, and operations. Generalists bring a broader perspective, and they’re more likely to introduce novel ideas by connecting patterns across industries and bringing in fresh ground breaking ideas.
On the other hand, junior or mid-level roles are often the right place to introduce specialist PMs—for instance, those with expertise in growth, data, AI, or consumer behavior. These specialists are often highly effective when focused on a specific segment of the product, provided they operate within the company’s strategic framework.
Common PM Specializations and When to Use Them
As your product and team scale, you’ll likely find value in hiring for specialized PM roles. Below are a few of the most common specializations and when each is appropriate:
A Platform PM focuses on infrastructure, internal tools, APIs, and shared systems that power various parts of your product ecosystem. This role is best suited for organizations that have multiple products or teams building on shared backend services. Platform PMs play a crucial role in scaling internal developer efficiency and promoting reusability across the organization. A common example would be leading the development of a unified authentication or identity service that supports several product lines.
A Growth PM is responsible for driving user acquisition, improving onboarding, increasing engagement, monetizing user activity, and enhancing retention. These PMs are most effective in startups that have achieved product-market fit and are looking to optimize and scale growth levers. Growth PMs lead growth teams that typically run continuous experiments across the funnel to find conversion opportunities. For example, they might lead A/B tests on onboarding flows to improve the rate at which free users become paying customers.
An Outbound PM focuses on go-to-market strategy, sales enablement, and product messaging. This role is especially important for complex enterprise products where close coordination with marketing and sales is essential. Outbound PMs often help organizations break into new verticals or support product launches with strong GTM narratives. A typical example would be working closely with the sales team to develop demo flows, FAQs, and provide roadmap clarity to key customers.
Domain-Specific PMs, such as those with expertise in AI, data, B2C, or fintech, bring deep subject matter knowledge within a particular industry or technology area. These roles are valuable in companies building AI-first products, data platforms, or regulated consumer-facing technologies.
Closing Thoughts
Understanding the different roles within a Product Management organization is a critical first step toward building a high-performing product team. As your company scales, clearly defining PM responsibilities and decision-making authority enables faster execution, better alignment, and stronger ownership at every level.
In the next post, I’ll go deeper into the principles of organizational design—different organizational structures and the varied results they are designed to produce and how to trade-off between them.
Let me know what you think and share your perspective in the comments below.
About the Author
Teja Vepakomma is a Product Strategy and Growth consultant to companies. He has many years of experience working in Product Management leadership roles in Global SAAS companies. He’s currently based in Bangalore, India. You can follow or reach out to him on LinkedIn.