Product Manager Job Description, Skills, and Salary
Get to know about the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and skills requirements of a product manager. Feel free to use our job description template to produce your own. We also provide you with information about the salary you can earn as a product manager.
Who is a Product Manager?
A product manager is a key member of an organization. His or her primary role is to ensure the development and release of new and improved products. He or she is responsible for setting goals, establishing processes, and generating creative ideas for new products. As a product manager, you will be responsible for brainstorming solutions to bugs and other issues that may affect the success of the project.
A product manager’s responsibilities are diverse, and many different companies hire a product manager to oversee the creation and launch of new products. A typical role requires a significant business and production background. As a product manager, you will be responsible for setting the product’s vision and roadmap. You’ll also be responsible for working with cross-functional teams to determine what the future course of the current or future product will be. As a result, you’ll be in charge of creating a product backlog and determining the priority of new features and enhancements.
The responsibilities of a product manager vary from company to company. Some work on new products while others focus on improving existing ones. You’ll be responsible for making a decision on which features to add and which to remove. Despite this high demand, the role of a product manager can be extremely rewarding. In addition to being the CEO of the entire product development process, your job will also require you to be an expert at managing budgets and business skills.
As a product manager, you’ll be responsible for solving problems and guiding the teams toward a common vision. Whether you’re a tech company or a startup, you must be passionate about user experience. Your job will require a variety of skills. The job description of a product manager is extensive, so you must understand the role well. This job description is not for the faint of heart.
Product Manager Job Description
The product manager role model builds on the manifest that the product manager is an entrepreneur for the product. From this, five interconnected roles can be derived that the product manager has to fulfill: strategist, requirements manager, interface manager, and promoter.
Below are the product manager job description examples you can use to develop your resume or write a product manager job description for your employee. Employers can also use it to sieve out job seekers when choosing candidates for interviews.
- Setting goals to provide a strategic direction
- Observing and evaluating market opportunities
- Focusing on market and customer requirements
- Ensuring competitiveness and future security
- Defining, evaluating, and marketing the products
- Controlling organizational units involved in the provision of services
Product manager as a strategist
As a strategist, the PM evaluates market opportunities and shows whether and how these can be used profitably for the company. The main instrument here is the product business plan. Continuous control is also part of the planning. This means that he retains full responsibility as a life cycle manager even after the market launch.
- Interpreting market analysis
- Defining goals and strategies
- Reflecting with the stakeholders
- Implementing strategy meetings
- Creating a product business plan
- Presenting in the product committee
- Procuring approvals & resources
- Monitoring implementation
- Adapting different strategies
- Managing the lifecycle of different products
Product manager as a requirements manager
As a requirements manager, the PM translates the customer’s problem into concrete product and performance requirements in the “upstream process”. Working out the customer benefit is of particular importance. In this role, the PM determines “what is done”, the specialist department “how it is done”.
His functions in this area include:
- Gathering ideas and requirements
- Consolidating the requirements
- Assessing and prioritizing the requirements
- Negotiating the requirements with R&D
- Working out customer benefits
- Defining target costs and sales quantities
- Tracking implementation of requirements
- Evaluating prototypes
- Implementing market tests
- Granting market approval
Product manager as an interface manager
As an interface manager, the PM coordinates all specialist departments to implement the strategies and measures defined in the product business plan. Since the PM usually has no line power, he must lead laterally. For this, he needs a high level of communication skills and social competence.
His functions in this area include;
- Organizing kick-off meetings
- Moderating meetings
- Identifying and managing stakeholders
- Receiving commitment and buy-in
- Communicating interim results
- Tracking implementation measures
- Coordinating activities
- Adjusting time and project plans
- Identifying critical issues
- Resolving (resource) conflicts
Product manager as a promoter
Now the product is properly marketed to the market in the “downstream process”. Marketing communication and sales are the main interfaces here. Central elements in this role are the product launch and marketing campaigns. Compared to your own sales department, the PM takes on the role of a salesperson! Enthusiasm, good presentation skills, and the formulation of benefit arguments are important success factors.
- Planning and preparation of the product launch
- Implementing and managing product project launch
- Creating product presentations
- Implementing product presentation
- Implementing sales training
- Selecting sales support
- Obtaining feedback from the distribution channel
- Adapting/sharpening the sales arguments
- Identifying and activating multipliers in the channel
Product manager as a portfolio manager
If the product manager is not only responsible for one product, but for an entire portfolio of products, his strategist role expands towards portfolio manager. The aim here is to further develop the existing portfolio in the direction of a successful target portfolio through the targeted control of phase-in and phase-out.
- Analyzing the current product portfolio
- Evaluating and managing different ideas
- Analyzing competitive portfolio
- Defining target product portfolios
- Developing the portfolio roadmap
- Prioritizing the project pipeline
- Managing product portfolio yield
Qualifications
There is no professional training to become a product manager. Specific Bachelor courses are only offered sporadically and with a focus on IT or software product management. There are also some contact points in the masters. Otherwise, the following applies:
The following paths can lead to product management.
Commercial education.
With a commercial apprenticeship, you have basic economic knowledge, know customer contact, and have been involved in one or the other marketing campaign, depending on the professional field. With additional work experience, your path can lead to product management.
Special training.
The course usually lasts about 12 months and ends with a corresponding certificate. The target group mainly employs people who want to take a distance learning course to become a product manager.
Economics degree.
You can do this anywhere in the world and consciously concentrate on the areas of focus that correspond to the tasks in product management – i.e. the areas of marketing, sales, production, or management. In addition, your job and entry chances as a product manager increase if you have the right professional experience. During your studies, for example, these would be appropriate internships or working student activities.
In addition, a product manager scores with certain soft skills. Because: You often manage products across departments – and you need the necessary organizational talent for this. In addition, it is the job of the product manager to work creatively, think innovatively, and act with foresight. You should therefore have excellent communication skills to be able to make arrangements with all parties involved transparently and constructively.
Programming knowledge or tool skills (product management system) are often important prerequisites, particularly in technical product management.
Essential Skills
To fulfill the associated tasks, he must occupy a total of four fields of competence: technical competence, methodological competence, presentation competence, and lateral leadership competence.
Presentation skills
Product managers are constantly challenged to communicate their ideas, findings, and strategies for their products to colleagues, department heads, managing directors, and decision-makers. The ability to get to the heart of complex issues responsibly and convincingly is a key skill here. This includes:
- Structuring content and bringing it to the point
- Understanding visualization of complex content
- Convincing through appearance
- Convincing through storytelling and the arc of suspense
- Presenting and “selling” appropriate to the target group
- Board ability and presentation to the board
- Active flight altitude control for the content depth
Lateral leadership skills
The majority of the service provider over the product life cycle does not take place in product management but the specialist departments. To be successful here, the product manager needs a high degree of lateral leadership competence, as he usually does not have any linear leadership power.
These aspects belong to this competence:
- Being able to lead yourself
- Build standing and authority
- Build trust and human relationships
- Active stakeholder management
- Targeted involvement of colleagues and decision-makers
- Inspire and motivate others
- Build/maintain internal/external network of relationships
- Being able to listen, ask questions, moderate
- Conduct constructive conflict discussions
- Appreciate, share your ideas/successes with others
Professional competence
The product manager needs extensive knowledge and understanding of the entire relevant product market. This includes:
- Function, structure, and application of your products
- Underlying Technologies
- Market structure and market segment
- Market size, market potential, market growth
- Market trends, exogenous factors
- Relevant legislation, standards, regulations
- Target groups, persona, pain & gains, benefit expectations
- Competitors, competitor strategies, market shares
- Sales intermediaries, recommenders, distribution channels
Methodological competence
Methodological competence describes the ability to know the necessary methods, procedures, and tools to fulfill one’s corporate responsibility as a product manager.
This includes methods from the following areas:
- Market and competition analysis
- Formulation of goals and strategies
- Product portfolio management
- Product lifecycle management
- Marketing tools
- Sales, sales, and earnings planning
- Profitability calculation
- Systemic thinking
- Structuring information
Where to work
The cross-industry variety of products plays into your cards. Product managers are searched for almost everywhere, which will certainly make your job search easier. University graduates and young professionals often begin as junior product managers – and are promoted to senior product managers in the course of their careers. That means not only more salary, but also more responsibility. You can also achieve management positions in the entire marketing or sales management. And with global players, the successful path abroad often beckons.
How to Become a Product Manager
Although almost every company employs product managers, there is still no regular training. The way to becoming a product manager usually leads to a degree in business administration or other economics courses. Graduates with a degree in natural sciences also have access to the job of product manager – especially in technical product management. It is usually important to employers that the candidate for the position of product manager has professional experience. However, some companies also give graduates with no professional experience a chance, but then in the role of a junior manager who does not have full responsibility for a product. In this way, they can learn the necessary skills “on the job” and develop them further through targeted training.
However, the path to product management is also open to prospects with commercial training who have basic economic knowledge, experience in customer contact, marketing, and sales know-how. They can acquire a lack of know-how in product management courses. Incidentally, these are also very suitable for career changers who have a high level of motivation and passion for the product. Even long-standing product managers should receive further training from time to time because the market is changing rapidly due to new developments and trends.
Product Manager Salary Scale
As a product manager, you will perform different tasks depending on the company and industry. This also means that your salary can vary depending on the situation. The size of the company also has an impact on your salary: the larger the company, the greater the earning potential as a product manager. However, working in a smaller company also offers the advantage that you have more opportunities to participate and bear more responsibility.
Your salary as a product manager is not only influenced by the conditions in your company, it also depends on you. For example, your previous professional experience as a product manager plays a role in the calculation of your salary. While junior product managers can expect an annual salary of around 43,000 euros, as an experienced product manager with increasing professional experience, you earn more. Since you as a product manager take on a lot of responsibility and very complex tasks, you have more opportunities with increasing professional experience.
After all, your other qualifications also influence your salary as a product manager. This not only includes your soft skills, especially organizational and analytical skills but also your professional competencies. As a specialist in your respective industry, you have particularly good cards.
