A deeper look into the Product Management role
Hiring the right Product Manager can enhance your product strategy and bring a lot of benefits, like saving money and time for the team.
For the last 3 years, I was hiring talents for different products. During this time, I was working with various components of product teams — like engineers, product analysts, designers, and managers. I had more than 300 interviews with product people during this time, which helped me shape my understanding of hiring for a product.
A Product Manager is a crucial part of an organization. According to the survey run by Product Management Festival, 43% of responders said that Product managers are seen as leaders and product management as the key differentiator.
Product Management is a perfect intersection of business and technology. And it is a crucial role for building a team that will thrive and building a product in the right direction. While everyone can agree on what most product roles (engineers, marketing specialists, designers, etc.) are in charge of, the Product Manager’s responsibilities often could be blurred.
Lack of role clarity is one of the Top-3 challenges that PM’s usually face, according to 35% of the respondents.
PMs might have a lot of different tasks included in their daily grind. Moreover, the range of functions of the Product Manager could vary depending on the product, company, and team size. Some of the tasks could be building customer acquisition channels, developing growth models, jumpstarting the new product, supporting existing product, implementing new features, etc. Depending on the product needs, companies are looking for different skill sets in candidates.
So I researched how different companies see the Product Manager’s role in their organization. Here is a deeper view of what’s happening behind the scene of hiring.
Please note that this is the combination of the most common requirements from different companies.
- Customer-centricity.
Nowadays, it’s true that whether you’re PM at the start of your career or whether you’re an experienced PM — you have to be customer-centric. Following customer development stages (described in well-known The Lean Startup book), a PM can validate assumptions and learn through customer feedback. Constant communication with the customer is what makes the PM outstanding. It helps to empathize, receive valuable customer insights, and expose blind spots you have in product development.
(Recommendations: The Mom Test book and The Four Steps to the Epiphany are great books to dive deeper into the topic) - Experience of working with big scales.
For big products it’s important to hire a Product Manager with experience of working with big scales. Making mistakes with a moderate size of the audience — it’s great learning to shape the product better in the future, while for a big product making small mistakes can cost a lot of money and sufficient loss of existing customer base. - Technical skills.
One of the most rewarding skills companies are looking for in Product Managers are technical skills. Technical credibility allows the PM to understand the technical core of the product and to build bonds with the engineering team. This can make collaboration more efficient and smooth for both parts. Lack of technical background usually makes engineers spend too much time explaining if the solution is not valid and what steps should be undertaken when a technical problem occurs. - Ability to collect and analyze the right data.
Although almost every company on the market describes themselves as data-driven, not all of the PMs are proved to be so. Usually, product teams have data analysts who can execute analysis, but knowing what data to collect and how they affect key product metrics is crucial in making correct conclusions. Today there are a lot of tools that allow you to get the data you need. But what’s more important is that the PM should know HOW to work with the data.
Understanding of data enables the PM to build hypotheses and analyze results so the product will develop in a rewarding way for a company. Being comfortable and regularly working with some of the metrics like customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, repurchase rate, daily active users, feature usage, user churn, NPS, LTV, etc. is what makes PM data-driven. - Experience with experiments.
Here is what Netflix says: “We use controlled A/B experiments to test nearly all proposed changes to our product, including new recommendation algorithms, user interface (UI) features, content promotion tactics, originals launch strategies, streaming algorithms, the new member signup process, and payment methods. When A/B experiments are not possible, we rely on quasi-experiments and causal inference methods, especially to measure new marketing and advertising ideas.”
Today, almost every big product made experimentation a part of the product culture (e.g., here is Netflix’s TechBlog about experimentation). Being comfortable with different experimentation frameworks and wisely designing experiments saves a lot of time and money for the product. No matter how sure you are about customers’ behavior, results of experimentation can always surprise you. Just assumptions, based on PM’s gut feelings, can often be delusional.
The significant section in the Product Manager’s profile is soft skills. It’s like a glue that holds up all of the hard-skills above together.
These soft skills are:
- Communication
- Being able to influence
- Self-awareness and consciousness
Working with cross-functional teams and different stakeholders demand Product Manager to be flexible but confident and decisive. The Product Manager has to influence, address concerns, and negotiate with stakeholders daily.
According to the Pragmatic Institute Annual Product Management and Product Marketing Survey, Product Managers spend on average 40 hours per month on attending meetings and 25 hours per month on managing email, which is a significant amount of time spent on communication.
“The role is challenging — setting the vision for the product, defining metrics and goals, reaching alignment across team members and stakeholders, and of course — “kicking ass” on execution.” — that’s how the Director of Product Management at Facebook describes the Product Management role.
“With great power comes great responsibility” © Uncle Ben
This chart shows a significant influence of Product Managers on the development of the product.
So the role holds a lot of exciting challenges, and it usually rewards the person who has stepped on the path.
Talking about the challenges and difficulties that candidates can face, there is an inequality problem for females. While it’s not that obvious for a Junior and Middle PM roles, numbers below show that it’s a bigger problem for senior-level roles.
Women face gender bias in hiring and in the promotion process. Females tend to be more insecure about their performance and double-think their results and achievements. Luckily a lot of work is going in this field, and society is fighting with unconscious bias by speaking up and spreading awareness among employers and professionals. However, females still need more empowerment, support, and mentoring to achieve career goals, go up the career ladder, take senior roles, and get stronger as leaders.
Females need more examples and role models of women who can lead products to success, inspire the team, and be a reliable partner to other stakeholders in the company.
Here are the numbers. Pragmatic Institute Annual Product Management and Product Marketing Survey showed that men are the majority among Product Managers.
As Product Management Festival’s report shows, there is even bigger inequality among salaries for Males and Females in Product Management, especially for senior roles.
As starters McKinsey&Company research Women in the Workplace, there is a “broken rung” that prevents women from reaching the senior-level roles:
“Progress at the top is constrained by a broken rung. The biggest obstacle women face on the path to senior leadership is at the first step up to manager. For every 100 men promoted and hired to manager, only 72 women are promoted and hired. This broken rung results in more women getting stuck at the entry level and fewer women becoming managers. Not surprisingly, men end up holding 62 percent of manager-level positions, while women hold just 38 percent.”
Let’s embrace diversity because inclusivity brings more great leaders and skilled Product Managers in organizations and better results.
Requirements for the Product Manager role vary from company to company. So when you’re searching for a job in Product Management, you have to consider a lot of factors about the company to understand what they might be looking for.
