15 Cool Product Manager Titles for any Corporate Culture

As an agile team lead, you may be aware of the variety of product manager titles. In some companies, work is carried out according to specific frameworks and there are defined titles with correspondingly defined responsibilities. This certainly has advantages. 

At the same time, however, there is the disadvantage that you cannot flexibly invent more or less cool titles yourself, which can then be used with a wink. After all, a funny title can do one thing particularly well: take away the respect for a role that is potentially higher up in the hierarchy.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some alternative job titles for Product Managers.

First of all: If you are a new manager, I recommend my video with 7 typical mistakes managers make that you should definitely avoid.

Play

Let’s start with a few alternative job titles for Product Managers that you may be familiar with, and that are also common in companies - so they probably wouldn’t primarily be described as “cool”:

The core: Product Owner as the heart of the agile team

A very similar title to Product Manager is Product Owner. Although there are differences - these are not always taken into account in practice. The Product Owner is a key role in agile project management. They act as a link between customers, stakeholders and the development team.

Hierarchy in product management: from Associate to VP

The hierarchy of product management titles ranges from entry-level (Associate Product Manager) to Head (VP Product Management). It reflects not only the level of experience, but also the area of responsibility. 

Strategic orientation: The Group Product Manager

The Group Product Manager is more than just an experienced product manager – he thinks strategically and is responsible for product groups. Example: The introduction of a Group Product Manager has improved the strategic direction of a product line, leading to an increase in sales. 

So, that’s the basis for alternative job titles for Product Managers, so to speak. Now it gets a bit more exciting.

Of course, you can also get more creative. The following list includes some existing and some newly invented alternative job titles for Product Managers that may serve as inspiration for you to describe your role as well as possible.

• Product Strategist
• Customer Experience Manager
• Product Innovation Manager
• Product Solutions Manager
• Program Manager
• Head of Product Design
• Product Director
• Product Management Leader
• Senior Product Director
• Lead Product Manager
• Product Engineer
• Product Consultant
• Product Management Specialist
• Junior Product Manager
• Product Trainee
• Product Lead

Okay, and now it’s getting particularly creative, it’s probably a matter of taste how cool you think the titles are. ChatGPT helped me with these ideas, they are at least inspiring 😄:

• Innovation navigator: Chief Innovation Navigator (CIN)
• Product Strategy Maestro: Product Strategy Maestro (PSM)
• Customer value architect: Customer Value Architect (CVA)
• Agile Product Visionary: Agile Product Visionary (APV)
• Strategic product orchestrator: Strategic Product Orchestrator (SPO)
• Digital innovation sorceress: Digital Innovation Sorceress (DIS)
• Technology Alchemist: Technology Alchemist (TA)
• Customer Trust Engineer (CTE)
• Agile Experience Artisan: Agile Experience Artisan (AEA)
• Growth Architect (GA)
• Collaboration catalyst: Collaboration Catalyst (CC)
• Product Design Artist: Product Design Artist (PDA)

All right, if there’s no alternative job title for you as a product manager, then I’m stumped. Finally, let’s move on to a tip that should be interesting for every product manager.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you ultimately call yourself. The most important thing is that you deliver customer value in regular iterations. This is exactly where Echometer can help you by serving as your center for continuous improvement of your agile team. It is specifically designed for teams that do not have a dedicated full-time Scrum Master.

On the one hand, Echometer helps with team coaching with a retrospective tool, but also with a one-to-one meeting tool. It focuses on making any team leads from agile teams that have regular one-to-one meetings more efficient.

Make your 1:1 meetings exciting, measure trends and, above all, make progress in the development of your software developers! Try out one of our templates, see below.

By the way: If you want to become a really good leader, a servant leader, I recommend the following video. It explains 21 scientifically proven behaviors that distinguish mediocre leaders from excellent ones - feel free to check it out.

Play

Titles can be dangerous if they imply a strong hierarchy. That’s why I’m a fan of titles that take the daily work with humor.

Christian Heidemeyer, Psychologist & Scrum Master

The variety of more or less cool alternative titles for Product Managers reflects the range of skills and responsibilities. From Product Owner to VP Product Management: Each title can and will be interpreted differently in practice. Use the titles consciously to reflect the appropriate expertise and responsibility in your agile team - perhaps with a wink.

Lastly, one more note: If you’d like to try out what it feels like to develop your team with our tool: You can start an agile retrospective without logging in below, in this case the “Keep, Stop, Start” workshop. 

Alternatively, simply forward our website to the responsible colleagues: www.echometerapp.com.