A Quick Guide to a Career in Software Product Management

Make decisions on which features to add or revise for new product version. The part-time User Experience Design course was developed for professionals with an interest in UX design. The Design Thinking training course gives you the skills to solve complex business problems using design thinking methodologies. BrainStation is the global leader in digital skills training, empowering businesses and brands to succeed in the digital age. BrainStation helps companies prepare for the future of work through cutting-edge digital skills training, top talent recruitment, and more.

The product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product by creating and managing the product backlog. This person creates user stories for the development team and communicates the voice of the customer in the Scrum process. Both the product manager and the product owner work towards a common goal — to build and improve products that create meaningful value for customers and all stakeholders within the company. This usually happens by delivering and optimizing product features.

Product owners and product managers

With your analytical skills, you are responsible for forecasting the product market and predicting sales. When making a decision, data-driven decisions are trusted the most. The data product managers are great at finding patterns and reading between the lines. You also gain an understanding of sales and help forecast the demand. When building a product, the product must be important to the business and customers.

A Product Manager (i.e., the mid-level) will typically be managing small- to medium-sized projects . Contact us to learn more about how you can hire from us to achieve the right business results. At Full Scale, multiple candidates have gone through a skills assessment. Our rigorous hiring process lets us choose the most qualified candidates to fit our clients’ needs.

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A product manager and a CEO use an internal roadmap to control the progress. But responsibilities can shift a bit when team makeups and practices shift. On the other hand, if the team is doing Scrum, but doesn’t have a product manager, then the product owner often ends up taking on some of the product manager’s responsibilities. The responsibilities of a software product manager depend on many factors, such as company size, culture, industry verticals, etc. Product managers often drive the vision and support the product throughout every stage of the product life cycle. The skills, qualifications, and abilities listed above are what most organizations expect from software product managers, regardless of the industry.

In both cases, you’ll likely work in other roles on a product team before becoming a product manager. Also, they pitch ideas and work with the team to bring them to life. Here, a PM will have technical computer science and software engineering knowledge. This understanding will allow them to manage the development team. Technical product managers understand the technology behind the products they’re building.

What are the key parts of the product manager’s job?

The biggest pro of being a product manager is the independence and creativity they get to practise with their product. They are the brains behind the most minor and most prominent aspects of the life cycle of a product and lead its way towards the benefit of the users. Rachel Rubinstein is currently a Field-based Product Manager at Oxford Nanopore Technologies for the North America region.

• Software engineers are technical, knowledgeable in computer science, and focus on how to build something.
• Make sure you seek the role of a product manager because it genuinely interests you and not because of the job title alone.
• As with other product management roles, understanding market research, cost-benefit analysis, and business objectives are essential.
• We idolize these people, in part, because it’s satisfying to put a face and a name on a big accomplishment.
• You focus on gaining skills and becoming a good engineer first whereas PM-ing is more of a trial by fire.

This is a job with a high job satisfaction rating, as well as great potential for growth. If you put in the experience, you could become a Senior Product Manager, making an average software product development company salary of $125,384 or even higher in software, a constantly in demand industry. You could even advance to Product Manager director, with an average salary of $145,634.

Software Product Manager Role and Responsibilities

You’ll need to be able to think strategically and see the big picture. You’ll also need to work well with others, handle difficult situations, communicate effectively, and make decisions quickly. It’s also important for the product manager to create a positive, productive environment where the team can do their best work. Being a good motivator can be a challenge, especially when things aren’t going well — but it’s essential for the success of the product. The main difference between a product manager and a digital product manager is that a digital product manager focuses on digital products, such as software or applications. To be effective on this job, the manager must be technical savvy and possess a unique blend of business knowledge and skills; a big-picture vision, as well as the passion to make that vision a reality.

With a background in software engineering, you already have some skills that will help you succeed in the product manager role. With a background in engineering, you can speak the engineers’ language, making it easier to communicate across the technical landscape. In any case, building great software requires the software product manager to switch between all their ideation, strategy, and feature implementation roles at the same time. Let’s not forget that software product managers need to keep the product team, scrum team, engineering team, and development team in check. Software engineers primarily work with other engineers as well as product and design teams to create the best solutions. They focus on building the software and use their technical skill sets to execute a vision.

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They manage products from their conception to long after their launch, including customer research and adding new features. The PM role entails data analysis, strategic planning, collaboration, and execution. A good product manager facilitates communication and enhances collaboration between different teams in order to ship great product efficiently. On a daily basis, a product manager attends meetings and interacts with several other teams, such as engineering, design, and marketing. Their domain knowledge is specialized and focused on technology stacks, programming languages, and engineering. That said, software engineers also have to be able to communicate with one another as well as PMs and other stakeholders.