Product Manager Jobs

As you’ve seen, product manager jobs are incredibly interdisciplinary and involve wearing a lot of hats from day to day to stay on top of critical aspects of production. You already know that to do this, an aspiring technical product manager must master a challenging combination of tough technical skills and supportive soft skills, but how do all those skills work together exactly? Let’s examine some roles that typically get assigned to product managers during development:

• Product specialist: To translate customer requirements into user stories for the team to work from in development, a PM has to know their product, company, target market, and competition like the back of their hand. They are the product’s first subject matter expert.
• Business specialist: PMs can also act as liaisons between development teams and the business as a whole. They communicate with and manage key stakeholders, almost like diplomats acting within an org.
• Leader: The most successful product managers are leaders before anything else. As the product’s first subject matter experts and evangelists, they must be able to guide teams through development, inspiring them to completion.

Product owners do a lot. On scrum teams, the product owner must act in the customer’s stead, outlining requirements that must be incorporated into the final product. This role is as highly collaborative and communicative as it is technological! To be successful in product owner roles, you’ll want to make sure you’re not only in touch with what end users want, but that you can convey it to the development team in ways they understand. Did we mention you have to manage the product backlog too? Because you do. Here are a few more job responsibilities that fall under the product owner’s purview:

• Align identified consumer and stakeholder needs with a company’s unique goals to define a product’s overall strategy.
• Manage the product’s backlog of features and requirements yet to be developed.
• Understand the business value of product features and prioritize them accordingly during development.
• Collect feedback from customers and stakeholders to drive future improvements or development of subsequent products.

Since product management as a career is still pretty new (as with many technology-based careers), there’s no set path yet for aspirants to follow. This can be a wonderful thing; with PMs arising from a plethora of backgrounds, the field itself is rife with diverse knowledge. However, if you’re feeling stymied by all of the possibilities in lieu of a clear guide, start here with the below list of generalized baseline qualifications. These qualities are needed for most, if not all, modern PM jobs:

• A bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (good bets for product management are STEM or business-related subjects)
• Familiarity with modern PM doctrines like Agile and Scrum
• Experience with project management tools
• Strong communication skills
• Proven leadership ability

While many, many product manager jobs are in technology companies, you don’t necessarily have to work in tech to break into the field. Lots of different industries are now in need of talented PMs, and depending on your skill set, you may find that it’s easier to get started in product management roles in a non-tech industry than vice versa. Here are some examples of industries to add to your search for PM positions:

• Retail/eCommerce
• Healthcare
• Consumer Products
• Technology and IT
• Finance