Roles and teams
Technical product manager
Also calledPlatform product manager, TPM (product)
A product manager whose product is technical, such as an API, a data platform or internal tooling, and whose customers are usually other teams.
A technical product manager does the same job as any product manager, deciding what to build and for whom, but for products that engineers consume. Success looks like other teams adopting the platform without needing help.
The role usually needs enough engineering background to reason about trade-offs such as performance, reliability and migration cost with the people building it.
The abbreviation TPM is ambiguous: at Amazon and Microsoft it usually means technical program manager, a different job. Spell it out when it matters.
Common mistake
Drifting into acting as the architect. The job is deciding which platform capabilities to build and for whom, not how to build them.