As the job market becomes increasingly more dynamic and demand for new jobs and skills arise, we will provide you with a series of career plan articles. In this way, we attempt to give you a sneak peek into new career opportunities and what trainings there are to help you stay competitive and progress in your professional development.
Product Manager
Product Management in the software industry is one of the most popular upcoming jobs, result of the increasing digitalization and development of software products. It was recently ranked as one of the 10 best jobs in the US in a study by Glassdoor based on three benchmarks – job salary, career opportunities and number of jobs available on the market.
First of all, what does a Product Manager exactly do?
A Product Manager coordinates the development of software products – everything from creating the product vision, working closely with the development teams and all the way to organizing the marketing and sales activities related to taking the product to the market.
The role of the Product Manager should not be mistaken with the Project Manager. The easiest way to explain the difference is by simply saying that the Product Manager is occupied with what the product will do, while the Project Manager is occupied with the process of building the product.
So, what skills are necessary for the job?
A good Product Manager has a mix of business and technical skills. On one hand, they have to regularly talk to customers, perform competitive and market analysis and participate in the business and marketing planning. On the other hand, they have to be able to translate the customer perspective into tasks for the development team through writing user stories, prioritizing and sizing the user stories, and managing the feature backlog.
There are many different product management roles but almost certainly you will come across the following profile requirements:
- Profound knowledge of Agile product development;
- Ability to write product definition statements, user stories and technical requirements;
- Stakeholder management skills and ability to collaborate with many different functions;
- Strong communication skills;
- Excellent presentation skills;
How to become a Product Manager?
No matter whether you have naturally grown into the position or you are new to it, the Product Manager role is a high-demanding job with some serious-business responsibilities. Therefore, formal training in the key areas of the job can be highly beneficial to the team collaboration and the quality of the product.
Recommended Courses:
Project Management Foundation in Practice gives you the knowledge about the key roles and responsibilities of the project manager and project team in a comprehensive way and understand the importance of applying good Project Management practice in projects of any size.
Writing User Stories will provide you with the hands-on knowledge on everything you need to know on how to write good user stories which the developers will love.
Agile product development with PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® will provide you with profound understanding of the agile methodology.
PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)® will give you overview of business analysis, and provide you with tools and techniques for uncovering business needs, managing requirements, and creating effective solutions to business problems so to improve the overall success of projects.
PMI-ACP and PMI-PBA are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
