Career Opportunities in Product Management

• Business-to-Business
• Business-to-Customer 

Marketing

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Market Research

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Digital Marketing

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Advertising

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Ad-tech

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• Have a deep understanding of customer experience and identify and fill product gaps
• Generate new ideas for the product to grow market share
• Create new products or strategies based on market and consumer research
• Determining a product's pricing based on the exhaustive reach of the competition and target customers
• Convert product strategy into detailed requirements and prototypes for development
• Work closely with multiple stakeholders like management team, engineering team, and marketing team
• Evaluate promotional plans to ensure that they are in line with product strategy
• Be Responsible for the creative, innovative side of the business as well the analysis and strategy end sides
• Lead product launches by coordinating with public relations team, analysts, executives, and other marketing team members

Career Pros Details

• Get to explore various fields such as technology, designing, marketing, etc.
• Remuneration is good

Career Cons Details

• They are the strategy leader, therefore if a product doesn’t do well, they are accountable for that.
• Should be good at influencing, to align work to others.
• Have to come up with new ideas, which can be tedious

1. Have a way with words

A product manager’s day is filled with communication tasks: meeting notes, Slack conversations, wikis, presentations, training materials, and—the Holy Grail—your product requirements document. You will spend a lot of time writing.

As the product manager, you are a repository keeper of all product knowledge. That means you should also be the disseminator of all knowledge. It’s your job to keep internal and external team members up to date on what’s happening. It’s also your job to provide clear and comprehensive direction and guidance to your design, engineering, and development teams. Poorly presented information can result in misaligned expectations and missed deadlines. 

Writing your product requirements document is arguably one of the most important responsibilities you’ll have as a product manager. It is the document your teams refer to from concept to launch for critical information about product direction, specifications, key dates, target audience, key performance indicators (KPIs), and much more. You need to be able to structure and write this document so that it’s easy to follow and understand, despite the depth and breadth of the information it contains.

Good writing skills also come into play when it comes to educating your stakeholders, partners, and company leadership about different product initiatives. You may at times need to employ the tools of persuasive writing to get buy-in on a particular decision or justify a shift in strategy.

The bottom line is that words matter, so you need to know how to use them effectively to support your agenda.

2. Take time to talk to customers

Spending time with users can be the most rewarding part of the product manager role. It’s also one of the most effective ways to achieve product success. After all, customer loyalty is one of the key drivers of growth. 

As the product manager, you are the voice of the customer within your organization. It’s your job to have an intimate understanding of their needs so you can effectively advocate for a solution that meets those needs. Having “passionate empathy” for your customers is especially critical in today’s SaaS markets where users have many options and can switch products easily and quickly. 

The shortest route to deep customer knowledge is direct dialog. Take the time to get to know your customers. Make an emotional connection. Start by asking questions about how your product makes a difference in their lives. You want to get to the heart of the value they experience as well as any shortcomings. 

Sample starter questions include:

• What is it about this product that resonates with you?
• How does it make things easier for you?
• What problem has this product helped you solve?
• What new problems would you like to help you solve?

Be creative and consistent about engaging your users. You can send out surveys, post questions on social media, facilitate focus groups, or initiate 1:1 conversations. The point is to reach them where they are and communicate with them in a way that’s comfortable and convenient for them. 

Most importantly, if you’re asking for customer input, make sure you put it to good use. Few things will cost you credibility with customers more than soliciting their opinions and then failing to act on them. When customers take the time to share their experiences, make sure you acknowledge them. Respond to their posts, and keep them in the loop with how you’re putting their valuable advice to work. 

3. Know how to sell (to engineers)

Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook, states:

“Engineers make every good proposal real, and this fact should never, ever be forgotten. Even if your company has five, or five hundred, or five thousand engineers, engineers are not a 'resource.' They are the builders of the foundations, the keepers of everything that makes your product tick.” 

As the product manager, it’s your job to sell your ideas to the people who can bring your vision to life—the engineers. To do this effectively, you need to understand how engineers think. This means need to be technically savvy enough to be comfortable discussing the technical aspects of your product. And you need to know how to effectively convey your product vision in a way that brings engineers on board. 

Successfully pitching your ideas to engineers requires a combination of enthusiastic evangelism, inspirational storytelling, and authentic empathy. 

Being an unabashed evangelist for your product is especially critical in larger organizations where you may be competing for shared resources. You need to be your product’s biggest fan—ready, willing, and able to convert others to your cause. 

Inspirational storytelling is a powerful way to create support for your product. This might include data-driven materials like market research and customer surveys. It might also include anecdotal customer interviews and testimonials.

Finally, having empathy for developers is an important part of creating a productive dialog. As Julie Zhou said, engineers are not a resource. Engineers are people who have their pain points and battles. Showing that you understand where they’re coming from goes a long way toward establishing you as a good partner. 

4. Know when to delegate

You’ve heard it a thousand times: Do what you do best, and delegate the rest. It’s smart advice that few people follow. 

Product coach and consultant Matt LeMay advocates delegating not only tasks but also responsibility. If you delegate tasks but insist on still being the go-to person for all decisions, you're missing out on the opportunities to empower the people around you and lighten your workload. Maintaining your point-person role means your team will still look to you for what to do next, and you’ll wind up managing their work on top of your own.

LeMay offers a few suggestions for effective delegation, including:

Be direct and clear. 

Because product managers are used to taking responsibility for so much, they often lack experience asking for help. Don’t bury the lede in ambiguity. Be direct, specific, and concise. Use the phrase, “I would like you to be responsible for” if it helps you frame the assignment more clearly.

Fight the urge to check-in. 

Once you've handed a task (and the corresponding responsibility!) over, let the other person run with it. Invite them to consult you if necessary, but otherwise make it crystal clear that they have complete ownership. This approach gives them the chance to showcase their skills,  provides space for a key learning experience, and ultimately sets them up for long-term success.

Debrief consistently.

Just like you track the performance of your product after it's launched—to figure out what worked and what didn’t—you should also track how team members performed on delegated tasks. Talk with them about their experience. If things didn't go smoothly, brainstorm collaboratively about how to handle things better next time.

5. Be able to support and influence others

If you want to be a successful product manager, you’d better have serious people skills. Business and technical skills are important, but you won’t be able to bring your product vision to life without similarly strong leadership and interpersonal skills. 

Product management isn’t just about being a taskmaster—it’s about supporting and empowering others by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. And it’s about having enough influence to get buy-in and keep everyone working together toward the same goal. 

For this, product managers need soft skills (like those on this list). Emotional intelligence and empathy help you read and manage situations more accurately and tactfully. Relationship management skills enable smoother operations and help with conflict resolution. Self-awareness helps you stay objective so you can be an effective champion for the customer.    

A good product manager also takes on the responsibility of maintaining alignment between the vision for the product and the product team. This requires connecting day-to-day tasks to the broader strategy so that a) initiatives are properly prioritized, and b) the extended team understands—and is inspired by—the ultimate impact of their work. 

In short, you need to motivate people by clearly articulating the big picture and why it matters to the customers and the company; and then you have to help each team member to do their best work in support of your collective goals.