 The biggest mistake where people break into product management is they don't know how to read the job description and they don't know what the right skills to build on and prioritize the wrong thing and waste them years of great opportunities. In this video, I'm going to break down the differences between technical product manager, technical program manager and product manager and tell you the four key differences in terms of those responsibilities, product type, technical knowledge and make sure to stay until the end of this video, where I share with you the salary differences among those three roles. Hey guys, this is Dr. NCD, a director product and featured in Forbes. I've helped thousands of people land their dream PM job offer in fan companies, a unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we cover tech trends and free product management training. Like and subscribe, watch our new video every Tuesday. Let's first talk about the roles and responsibilities. Technical product manager, technical program manager and product manager. Those names sounds very similar. Now let's first understand the differences in terms of roles and responsibilities. In a high level, both product manager and technical product manager, you can see them as the CEO or product. They manage the end to end product management life cycle to make sure that we create amazing product and customers love using it. We work on the product from the concept execution, starting from interview customers, create product features, design roadmap and working with engineers to build those features and prioritize features and also do stakeholder management. Towards the end, we work on go-to-market strategy to make sure customers is going to get access to those product and start paying for those products. However, for technical program manager, the key difference is that they are the COO of the product, which means they don't set the product vision or roadmap, but they manage the product management development process together with large cross-functional teams. Majority of the stakeholders are software engineering team, maybe legal or maybe design team and everybody involved. They are responsible for tracking the progress, make sure that everything is developed on time and on budget. Now, what's the differences between technical program manager and product manager in terms of roles and responsibilities? Their roles and responsibilities are very similar, but the key differences is that the type of product they work on and one of them, which is product manager, working more end-to-end and also more go-to-market strategy. Technical product manager working closely with very technical product and working closer with engineering team to develop something extremely technical. This leads to the second most important differences, which is product type. What different type of product managed by different product managers is going to distinguish them having a technical title or non-technical title? For example, if you are someone working on something extremely technical, you will have a technical product manager title such as Google Cloud, Generative AI product or database infrastructure. All those products are extremely technical and the end users are software engineers or someone who is extremely technical. So therefore, in order to manage and create those kind of product, you need someone who is very technical to become a technical product manager and create the developer facing product. And sometimes if you work on the platform as a service, they also need technical product manager because the end user of this platform is other product managers and building application on top of the platform. So therefore they need someone who is very technical. So what about the general product manager who is not technical? And even if you get a software engineering degree, you can become a general product manager. But general product manager, the type of product they manage, is more customer facing. For example, B2C product such as Uber and Chatbot or Airbnb. And they manage everything end to end with product. And they also designed the specific product features that were closer with designers to understand the customer journey map and UI, UX. On top of that, they also designed the end to end go-to-market strategy, which means, for example, once they design the Airbnb product, they need to understand how would you launch a product feature? What kind of customer segmentation you launch first? When do you go for a national launch and when do you start to do the beta testing? There's also the biggest misunderstanding of technical product manager. Even if people working for Google, you can be a general product manager. Even if someone working for AI company, you can also be a general product manager because it depends on how you structure your product management team. Some product managers to be technical product managers who are closely with engineering team, but some product managers, they can be more front-facing management who are closer with end users and the design team and also design the business model. In contrast of technical product manager, there is also a growth product manager, which specialized in growing the revenue of the product, growing the business, growing the user adoption. There's someone who do AB testing all the time and trying to drive the revenue of the company and the very business driven. And they still work with cross-functional team developed product, but their product is mainly focused on how can you make more money for the company. So I made a separate video that I deeper regarding what is a growth product manager and what kind of people should have advantage to become a growth product manager. You can check out this video right here. I also put it in the description of this video. Now, interesting myself, I had been the technical product manager as my first job working on AI product and then became a general product manager. Then I also become a technical product manager for edge computing product. Once it became a director, I started focusing more on go-to-market strategy and growth product management. So I have experienced all different types of product management and all those roles are transferable. We just need to figure out how can you be able to jump from one type of management to the other. And the best news is that I don't know how to code. Not at all. My PhD was in material science. You don't need to know how to code in order to become an AI product manager or cloud product manager or edge computing product manager. It's mainly based on the type of knowledge you master. Technical program managers also work on technical product. The type of product they work on is actually very similar to technical product manager. If you like all the free advice of our make sure to hit the like button. Now, let's talk about the third thing. Technical knowledge for different kind of product managers. First of all, I had to say the foundation of all kinds of product managers, regardless of your technical or non-technical, is that you have to master the end-to-end product management lifecycle skills and understand how to build a product from scratch. And those skills are, I described earlier, how would you be able to write product requirement documentation, contact voice customer interview, dry product road map and also lead without authority? And those are the same, regardless of technical or non-technical. When we talk about technical product management, you should understand the basics of traditional product management and then run the technical element on top of it. I have a separate video talking about the end-to-end product management lifecycle skills. I'm going to link it in the description of this video. Now, in this video, let's focus on the technical skills people need to master. When you read the drop description of generative AI product manager, they mainly talk about someone who has expertise and understand the generative AI and being able to create the product strategy using generative AI. But it didn't say that somebody need to be able to code as an engineer in the AI space. So therefore, what specific technical knowledge is actually required? It's way more simpler than most people understand. They are five key technical knowledge. I recommend everybody to study regardless of technical or non-technical. Number one, system design 101. This is a course that can help you to understand what the end-to-end process of design high-level system architecture. Number two, software architecture 101, which means that any time when you build any software product, regardless of Uber or generative AI or Airbnb or Lyft, those kind of product, is important. Any product manager, you understand the high-level software architecture and the best part is you only need to understand the one-on-one, the entry level, not in-depth, like coding perspective. Number three, cloud architecture 101. Nowadays, majority of the software is moving to cloud and cloud industry had grown by 10 times compared with 10 years ago. And more and more applications moving to the cloud or they decide to do a high break environment. So therefore, understand that high-level cloud architecture is very crucial for any product managers. Number four, large language model 101. This is a tech trend right now. Everybody is looking into AI space and especially generative AI. And you must understand what is large language model and so many entry-level training about large language model. I highly recommend everybody to check it out. Number five, it's machine learning 101. Means you must understand how do people train AI models? How do they reach to this level of intelligence and how people start to use it? So machine learning is a foundation for all the AI applications out there. The best part of all those one-on-one classes is that only takes you about one to two hours in total. I have lists of 10 different kind of technical courses that is a foundation for all the product managers to take. I'm going to link in the description of this video. You can also go to this website to download as well. Now, let's talk about the additional technology for all the technical product managers that really depends on the specific subject matter domain. For example, if you are a technical product manager for database, you need to understand the database infrastructure. If you're a technical product manager for Amazon Web Services, you must understand what is container, what is serverless compute. Now, if you're AI product manager for self-driving car, you must know additional information about self-driving cars, systems of cars, how to apply machine vision in a self-driving car's autonomous driving system. So therefore, everyone must follow the sequence, study the foundation of what's product management and all the one-on-one technical courses and then take specific domain you want to dive deeper if you want to become a technical product manager. But the good news is you really do not need to know how to code. You just need to find the balance, being able to communicate with engineering teams and make strategic technical decisions and make your engineering team respect you. Now, here comes the most asked question, salary. Technical product manager getting paid about 10 percent higher than technical product manager and product manager in total together also getting paid about 10 percent higher than technical program manager. The reason is product managers are being preceded as the CEO of the product. We make the part of decision, part of strategy and lead the product roadmap. So therefore, we general get paid higher than any other program managers out there. However, within product management, technical product manager get paid higher was because usually it's harder to find a combination skills of someone who knows and to empower management lifecycle skills plus specific technical domain. So therefore, if I want to get paid the highest in the tech industry, you can become a technical product manager. So how much the technical product manager get paid? If you're a technical product manager for fan companies, you should get paid about four hundred thousand dollars per year. If you are someone product manager, not technical product manager, you can reach at least three hundred thousand dollars per year salary as well. Now also depends on what type of technical product manager for example, Netflix, they're paying AI product manager after nine hundred thousand dollars per year and I also have students working as AI product manager getting paid over four hundred thousand dollars per year for non-fan companies as well. I also have a student who doesn't have technical knowledge at all. And she's an investment banker and she was able to transition to become part of manager working for a crypto trading company and she's getting paid over four hundred thousand dollars per year. So the level of salary is mainly determined by the type of company you're in, then the level you have and then depends on the product you build and finally depends on how technical you are. So therefore I recommend everybody to really break into product management first and pick the unicorn and maybe join fan companies or maybe unicorn startup. You can get paid significantly higher than anyone else. But as I said, in general, even in the same company, technical product managers getting paid about 10% higher than non-technical product managers out there. Of course, not everybody is able to join unicorn startup or AI companies or fan companies. And yours already should be around two hundred thousand dollars per year for non-fan companies as a product manager. Now, program manager, as I said, they could get paid between one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year, two hundred thousand dollars per year. If you're a fan company, program manager, you can get paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year. So the salary range is significantly different. Depends on many different factors. I made a separate video regarding my personal salary progression from entry level for a manager all the way to direct a product. And you can check out right here. I also break it down based on different factors goes into this equation. I'm also going to link in the description of this video. So now if you want to become a program manager in the tech industry, I highly recommend everyone to start to take the technical courses one on one, which are going to link in the description of this video and make sure check out the free salary training right here to get ready to know what your future income would look like. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PM Accelerator.com. See you in my next video right here.