Building a career in product management

Building a career in Product Management is one of great responsibility: a product’s entire lifecycle, from ideation to launch and beyond, will ultimately rest on a Product Manager’s shoulders. 

Overview 

Product management is one of the most lucrative jobs in tech. Even so, recruiters find Product Manager positions challenging to fill. One of the difficulties lies in finding seasoned and up-to-date candidates on the latest developments in tech; it’s a position that necessitates continuous training – yet another reason Product Managers often begin working in a different field before transitioning to product management mid-career.

Certifications

A lot to juggle is a deep understanding of your marketplace and your customer base, spotting new opportunities, and the ins and outs of usability testing, not to mention your business’s strategic goals, resources, and technical limitations. A Product Manager Certification will not only help you to master those skills, but it will also give you the confidence to feel comfortable overseeing the process.

In a product management certification course, you’ll also gain the specific technical skills that Product Managers need – like developing a go-to-market strategy, defining your minimum viable product, positioning and pricing your product, and creating competitive analyses and status reports. The list goes on: product launch metrics, A/B testing, version control, standard measurement platforms, familiarity with wireframing, UX design, and software development lifecycle methodologies like Scrum – all these things a Product Manager must be comfortable with overseeing.

What Are Product Management Tools?

Given the vast range of sectors in which Product Managers engage, it should be no surprise that they are required to be knowledgeable about many digital technologies. Many of the technologies on which Product Managers rely are common in today’s office. Others, on the other hand, are more focused on the development process or product management itself and are designed to help with key stages of the product management process. Examine some typical product management tools in further detail.

Industry analysis tools

A Product Manager’s ideas on which products to build and which features to highlight are two of the most important ways a Product Manager contributes to a company’s overall business plan. To do so, they must first understand what is happening in the sector. This often begins with industry studies from research organizations like Gartner, which collect data critical to developing a business plan.

Roadmapping and flowcharting tools

The next phase in creating any product is to write a clear blueprint for how the process will unfold. While you can design your strategy in a spreadsheet or word processor, this causes more issues than it helps. Instead, native programs like ProductPlan are designed to create flexible and easy-to-share roadmaps with built-in tools for version control problems, visualization, and interaction, assisting in better communicating the plan to the entire team.

As the product is being planned, flowcharting tools like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle allow Product Managers to design and rapid-prototype the user journey, identifying all points of interaction between customers and the brand along the route.

User analysis and feedback tools

Some customer survey tools, like Google Surveys, SurveyMonkey, Pollfish, and Typeform, give test users an accessible, web-based forum to submit their input in response to specific questions—which features they use most, for example, or would most like to see added in the future. 

To learn things about your users that they don’t know about themselves—and so can’t report—there are product analysis tools like Pendo, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. These help Product Managers collect data on the user experience by tracking users’ actual behavior on their sites or using their software. 

As you move into the later stages of user testing and feedback gathering, virtual conferencing tools like Zoom or GoToMeeting let you converse directly with customers or test users to hear their feedback firsthand and record these conversations for later review.

Project tracking and management tools

Jira, Microsoft Project, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello are among the project tracking and management tools available. Still, they can enable Product Managers to keep track of different tasks and statuses, exchange information with team members, and monitor issues for resolution. Essentially, these project management software applications assist you in adhering to your created plan.

Programs like LaunchDarkly and Split.io, in particular, allow you to successfully test new features, activating or deactivating them after code is online, or just experimenting with new concepts.

Collaboration tools

Last but not least, Product Managers’ tools for managing a (possibly huge) team of employees are frequently distributed across numerous departments and even working in separate places. Slack and Confluence may be invaluable for team chat, while collaborative files are typically stored in Evernote, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

How Much Do Product Managers Make?

According to sources such as Glassdoor and Payscale, the median compensation for a Product Manager is between $86,000 and $117,000, depending on the sort of work performed. A skilled Software Product Manager, for example, may make around $96,000 per year. That amount rises to almost $125,000 for Senior Product Managers.

Getting started!

Product management is a rewarding profession. It is a relatively new and technical sector that is regularly acknowledged by many schools, institutions, and corporations. Here are current Product Management job vacancies.

Good luck!