Product Management

Product managers, product owners, product strategy
Product managers are highly sought-after in the digital sector, especially in tech companies, financial services and retail, though employers are becoming more and more specific about the kind of product experience they’re seeking when hiring for these roles.

A product manager is responsible for deciding what a product team builds and why they’re building it. They are the intermediary between users, the business, and the engineering team, and their job is to ensure the team is working on the most valuable problems in the right order.

Product management is one of the harder roles to break into without prior experience, because so much of the job is about responding to the random confluence of real-world scenarios that can’t be learned in theory. Most PMs come from adjacent roles like software engineering, design, customer success, or data analysis.

It is expected that product managers will have experience and knowledge of Agile and Scrum methodologies, and job descriptions regularly ask for the ability to use tools such as Jira, Confluence, Mixpanel, Amplitude and Figma so it’s useful to learn as much as possible within each of them.

In consumer product roles, the focus will be on digital products used at scale. This requires experience with growth metrics, A/B testing and a deep knowledge of user behaviour.

There is more and more demand for platform and infrastructure product roles, since organisations are investing more in internal tooling, developer experience and data platforms.

In B2B product roles (particularly in Software as a Service/SaaS), the emphasis is on enterprise sales cycles, customer success and addressing the needs of multiple stakeholders.

Most job listings for product managers will fall into one of these three areas, and within that there are different seniority levels. A mid-level product manager will likely need to own a specific area of a product throughout its lifespan, taking in both engineering and design, while senior and principal PMs will be required to lay out roadmap strategy and contribute to organisational design. Chief Product Officer and VP of Product roles will have more to do with business alignment, team leadership and the long-term vision for a product.