Transitioning To Product Management
Everyone knows that nowadays IT companies are growing extremely fast because of the variety of services they provide and the products they create and develop. Five years ago no one could even imagine that there will be a time when people almost all over the world will start work remotely in just a few months. At that time even IT companies were not ready for such a fast transition and had troubles establishing their workflows.
Pandemic forced to close lots of businesses from many industries and thousands of peoples became unemployed. On the contrary, digital products and services started to grow very fast because people were staying home and they needed to fulfill their spare time. According to the growth users started to demand more features, content, or services from the applications, websites, or other digital products they used. So IT companies needed more employers to satisfy user’s needs and smooth the growth of the company. One of the main professions they need is a Product Manager. You will ask why?
I am not going to deep dive into product management in this story too much. I will only share some general points about it. “The product manager is the person, who collects and understands user needs and makes them become real by taking into account the company’s goals.” This is a very short and general definition of a product manager. Here are the main responsibilities of the product manager:
- Define product vision and strategy
- Communicate and collaborate with other teams or customers
- Be data-informed
- Discover user’s problems and solve them
- Reach business goals
- Lead the team
As I have already mentioned product management is one of the professions that people transitioned into from other jobs, cause lots of people who lost their job because of pandemics needed to feed their families and pay their loans. So why product management has such a demand? Let’s dive into some data.
Market demand:
As you can see in the graph the demand for product managers increased by 32%.
Salary:
The average base salary for a product manager is about $98,000.
According to Glassdoor, a product manager is the 3rd best job in the United States for 2021. The job portal currently has about 14,515 product manager listings. I think this data is more than enough to attract most of you to become a product manager or at least be interested in this profession.
The next question: who can become a product manager?
A Business Bachelor’s degree is enough to kickstart a career in product management. This provides you with essential skills, such as marketing, operations management, and finance. Of course, you will also need a mix of skills such as:
- Understanding of development process and product lifecycle
- Analytical and critical thinking skills
- Flexibility
- Problem-solving
- Market research
- Communication skills
I am not writing about user experience knowledge, writing technical documents, and some software knowledge (ex. Confluence, Jira, etc) as anyone can learn it from online courses and also during an internship, but what you can’t learn from the courses and books it’s product sense. That’s one of the most important things a real product manager should have and only product sense and knowing your user can boost your product and your career in product management. You can perfectly analyze data, have great soft and hard skills, but if you don’t have product sense and can’t feel or understand your user, you won’t be able to catch the moment and raise your product above your competitors.
As for me I also decided to transition to product management from marketing and business development, but not for the reason I lost my job, no haven’t, because the IT industry was always attracting me and I was feeling that one day I am going to be part of it and it happened. In 2020 I passed the interview for APM (Associate Product Manager) program at Picsart Academy and now I am an APM in the Monetization team and I love my job and my team. I have finally found myself in my career. That’s another great feeling that I wish you to have one day. A couple of takeaways and advice from my experience:
- Take an online course (Udemy, Coursera, etc)
- Read books (Platform Revolution, Building Products, Behind Every Great Product, etc)
- Watch online conferences on Linkedin, where lots of experienced product managers share their knowledge
- Never stop learning
- Think out of the box
And the most important in my opinion “Don’t be afraid to fail, cause after every failure you get new learnings, which makes you stronger and help you to overcome new challenges!”
