But how do you get to the root of your customers’ pain-points and needs?

This is where the Jobs to be Done framework can be used. It addresses the fundamental question: “What job is the customer hiring our product to do?” 

In this article, we’ll explore the framework in detail and discuss ways for product managers to implement it.

Here an overview of the topics we’ll look at:

1. What is Jobs to be Done?
2. How product managers use Jobs to be Done
   • Examples of Jobs to be Done in product management
3. Advantages of using Jobs to be Done
4. Disadvantages of using Jobs to be Done
5. How to use Jobs to be Done

1. What is Jobs to be Done?

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a framework, used within product management, that focuses on the customer and their needs. The theory, developed by Tony Ulwick, follows that a customer hires a product to get a specific job done. 

A popular example by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt is:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Using the Jobs to be Done framework, the product team takes a deep dive into what the job is that the customer needs done and how to effectively get it done, so that the needs of the customer are satisfied.

2. How product managers use Jobs to be Done

Product managers can use the framework in different ways. For one, JTBD can act as a customer centric and outcome-oriented lens through which to see the complete product development process. 

That way, it will influence all stages, starting from market segmentation, to competitor analysis, building a product roadmap, forming success criteria, as well as the continuous iteration of the product. 

However, it can also be used as an actual research and prioritization framework. This is most useful when building a new product or new features, as it starts from the beginning and goes deep into the customer research. 

The team will look into the main job the customer wants to get done, this can be seen as the end goal. When they have identified the main job, the team further checks into the functional and emotional aspects of getting the job done, which can be seen as the needs/requirements of how to get the job done. 

All of this will give the product team a good overview of the true motivations of the customer and the data collected can then be prioritized and used as a basis for finding innovative solutions.

Examples of Jobs to be Done in product management

Let’s look at some examples of jobs and collaborating needs and the products they have turned into:

Project management software

The main job here is to efficiently manage and collaborate on projects. The needs could be clear task organization, seamless communication within teams, easy progress monitoring and integration with other tools for workflow continuity.

Popular product examples that offer a solution for the above-mentioned example are Jira, which is the most widely used project management software within product management, as well as Asana and Trello.

Streaming services

The job that needs to be done is to provide entertainment. The needs could be to have a diverse content library, a user-friendly interface, personalized recommendations and high-quality streaming without interruptions. Examples of products trying to meet the above criteria are Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.

Smartphones

A smartphone’s main job is to stay connected and useful on the go. The needs are to reliably communicate, access information at any time and to have a camera functionality for capturing moments. Examples of products are the Apple iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy phones.

3. Advantages of using Jobs to be Done

The JTBD framework can be a powerful tool for product managers. Here are some of the advantages:

• Customer centric: The framework puts the customer and their pain points at the heart of the product.
• Informed decision-making: The research process is very thorough, meaning that a lot of data will be collected and analyzed, which will give a sound basis for decision-making.
• Innovation: By removing the focus from the product and putting it on the customer, the product team is free to think of completely new and creative solutions.
• Marketing: Once the product team knows their customers goals and pain-points, it’ll be easy to use targeted marketing when the product is built.

4. Disadvantages of using Jobs to be Done

While the framework has many advantages to it, we should also look at one of the main disadvantages of JTBD.

Too abstract

The product team will go for a deep dive into the struggles customers are facing and their specific criteria of how to solve them. 

This creates a lot of qualitative and quantitative data, which is very informative and potentially gives way to innovation, but it might also be too abstract for a product team to translate into a specific product and features. 

At this point, another framework might be used for the ideation phase, such as Design Thinking.

5. How to use Jobs to be Done

You might still wonder how to use the framework in detail. Therefore, let’s take a closer look at each of the steps.

1. Identify customer

The product manager first needs to identify the group of people they want to target with their product. This will be the job executor—the person that needs a specific job done.

2. Identify main jobs

By conducting interviews or surveys, the product team can find out the main jobs customers aim to accomplish. It is important to then find the core job underlying these main jobs, so that we end up with one job that can be used during the rest of the process. 

3. Map out process

With the help of a job map, the product team maps out the process of the core job that the customer is trying to get done. 

4. Identify needs

The next step is to check the metrics the customer will use to judge the success of how the job is being done. These success metrics are called “needs” within the framework.

5. Define job statement

Now that the product team is clear on the core job and the corresponding needs, it’s time to craft a concise job statement, with the format being: verb + object of the verb + contextual clarifier (optional). An example could be: listen to music on the go.

6. Research competitors

Now research should be done to look into existing solutions and how they address similar jobs. Customer interviews can be used at this stage.

7. Find solutions

When the research phase is finished, the product team can move over to the ideation phase, which will consist of brainstorming innovative ideas with an interdisciplinary team. As mentioned above, the Design Thinking process can be applied here.

It should be said that when it comes to customer research, it is not always the product manager that does this task but usually the UX designer. This will depend on the size and structure of the organization though. 

Larger organizations will usually have a UX design department that works together with product management to create concise solutions. Smaller organizations on the other hand mightn’t have a UX designer and thus a product manager might do all of the customer research themselves.

6. Wrap-up

The Jobs to be Done framework can be a powerful tool for every product manager. It offers a lens through which to see the product development process, since it puts the focus on the customer and their pain points. 

By digging deep into customer research, carefully prioritizing information and crafting innovative solutions around the jobs to be done, product managers can create products that deeply resonate with the motivations and needs of their customers.

While the framework offers many advantages, it’s essential to acknowledge potential drawbacks, such as the challenge of translating abstract insights into concrete products.

In essence, embracing the Jobs to be Done framework empowers every product manager to truly understand the heartbeat of product development—the customer’s needs, motivations, and product innovation.

If you want to learn more about what it’s like to be a product manager, check out ourfree product management for beginners short course, or have a look at one of the following guides:

• How to Launch a Product: The Complete Product Launch Guide
• What is AARRR? A PM’s Guide to the Pirate Metrics Framework

All manner of advice can be found under the subreddit r/ProductManagement: requests for help on how to deal with specific situations product managers tend to encounter on the job, offers of career advice on how to become a PM or being promoted to the upper ranks of the profession, as well as rants against particularly nagging stakeholders. 

Amongst this maze of both solicited and unsolicited advice, how are aspiring and junior PMs to navigate between conflicting pieces of information? We’ve attempted to create a curated collection of some of the best product management advice to be found on Reddit.Here’s what we’ll cover: 

1. How to break into product: general advice
2. Reddit product management interview advice 
   • Product management advice: What not to do
   • How to figure out if a company is product-led
3. Product management advice for the long haul
   • How to solve the stakeholder management conundrum
   • How to continue building your product management skills
4. Final thoughts

Just a short note that some comments have been edited for clarity and brevity. Let’s get into it!

1. How to break into product: general advice

If you could only read one thread summarizing many of the possible ways of breaking into product without any prior direct experience, this subthread manages to answer most of the questions keeping aspiring product managers awake at night (mind you, it’s quite detailed and a bit long for Reddit’s standards).

The thread reads almost like a mini-guide to some of the most frequently asked questions on product, including:

1. Credentials and education: what might be beneficial, how these can be used to make a career change into product management, how to decide if they are worthwhile.
2. How to approach the problem of having no direct experience in product.
3. What to look for in job descriptions if you are looking for entry-level positions.
4. How to identify transferable skills.

Why is this good advice? The thread starter is not offering vanilla-style opinions: myths are dispelled without much ceremony and the tone is one of “there are a couple of things worth doing, and quite a few that you shouldn’t bother with”. 

Learn more: What is Product Management? An Introductory Guide

2. Reddit product management interview advice

A very popular Reddit topic on product management is interview advice: how to approach interviews, what’s reasonable to expect in an interview, and what’s the best way of navigating them. 

Product management interview advice: what not to do

2023 was the year when the product world’s two most-debated topics were tech layoffs and how to leverage ChatGPT. Well, the following Reddit product management advice, offered by a hiring manager, gives very clear directions on how not to use AI in remote job interviews:

I’m hiring a PM and just rejected a candidate who was evidently reading out from ChatGPT.

All their responses were accurate textbook definitions, all the right buzzwords, and I could see them typing in and clear eye movements signaling me that they were reading through.

Instead of calling out their bull, I started to grill them further on a specific topic and I was amazed at how quick they were able to enter the prompt into GPT and read out the responses. After a certain point, they were unable to defend/justify their rationale and kept blabbering.

To all the junior folks who are actively interviewing, please be honest by mentioning whenever you don’t know anything. We would appreciate and respect that more than lies. It’s easier to detect bull than you think.

A lot of times, we expect you to not know things and ask clarifying questions. We often screen for whether you are able to think right or not, everything else can be taught and we are ready to invest in such candidates.

Why is this good advice? Beyond the obvious (the candidate was rejected), preparing a detailed script and just reciting it during an interview does nothing to improve a candidate’s interview skills. It also prevents a real dialogue from taking place, something of particular importance when trying to assess if a company and a role and the right ones for you.

Learn more: The 11 Top Product Manager Interview Questions, Answered

Also on the topic of interview advice, a PM subthread nails down a common frustration among those who have been faced with bookish, theoretical questions in interviews. Why should companies care if a candidate can memorize endless product management frameworks? Well, it’s not about the frameworks themselves, those are simply a proxy to evaluate Product Sense:

The product sense part of the interview is assessing whether or not you can guide their company in making the right decisions to meet their customer needs and their business objectives.

These are the “theoretical” questions you’ll get, and it gives the interviewer a sense of how you approach problem-solving, brainstorming, building a strategy, prioritizing a roadmap, etc. 

Why is this good advice? Besides restoring some hope that the product management interview process might not be entirely broken, this kind of advice allows candidates to keep the bigger picture in mind. 

Product management interview advice: how to figure out if a company is product-led

Let’s face it: not all companies can offer a fulfilling work environment for a product manager. A very reasonable number of them do not even know what a product manager really is.

And once you have tasted the water of disappointment a couple of times, you might start to wonder, like this Redditor, if there are any companies in the world that do product the way it’s supposed to be done. The best answer sums up the only possible attitude to have:

Realize there is no one “right” way to do product management or even to run a business. Being comfortable with uncertainty and a bit of chaos is one of the rites of passage for PMs.

Building on the importance of having a two-way interview to help you determine if a particular company is a good fit for you, another Reddit product management subthread was started by a PM who realized, after reading product expert Teresa Torres’s The Building Trap, that they probably hadn’t been doing product as it should be done. So what kind of questions can a PM ask during the recruitment process to ensure they get a fairer chance next time?

Tell me a little bit about the last big feature the product org has released. How was it prioritized over other features? What was the company strategy that drove this prioritization? What customer/user insights drove this prioritization? Who played a role in how it was prioritized, and who ultimately made the decision to prioritize it?

Why is this good advice? These questions, if answered, will allow the candidate to gain an accurate picture of the decision-making and prioritization processes used within the company. The absence of answers will in turn indicate that the company might base its decisions on little more than intuition, guesswork or managerial preference.

3. Product management advice for the long haul

A third category of topics which is quite popular on product management Reddit is either specific situations that product managers continuously face on their day-to-day work or the ever important matter of career development.

The good news is that there’s quite a lot of helpful answers and actionable advice out there. I’ve picked out some of the best for you:

How to solve the stakeholder management conundrum

Any product manager knows that stakeholder management is one of the most crucial aspects of the role. So naturally it pops up a lot.

On a subthread about stakeholder communication, one Redditor asks for advice on how to deal with stakeholders who push for specific solutions to be implemented, while not bothering to explain why they’re so crucial in the first place. How should a PM approach this delicate situation while preserving the relationship with said stakeholders?

This was one of the best pieces of advice from the replies:

Avoid antagonizing your demanding stakeholder. Avoid justifying yourself.

Instead, ask for their help in understanding the why, and what kind of positive impact it might have for the company or the product.  

Why is this good advice? It provides an actionable and concrete strategy on how to deal with a tricky situation while also taking steps to make the relationship evolve in a direction that becomes easier for the PM to manage.

On a related topic, a different Reddit product management subthread asks for help on how to manage your manager, also a very typical situation that most people working in product go through. For product managers (or in this case, product owners), being in a situation where they’re being micromanaged runs against everything good they have been taught about their trade.

In a way, it’s almost like the ultimate test: will you bow to the demands of an unreasonable manager, or will you stand your ground and understand that while people cannot be changed, circumstances can?

Why is this good advice? Nearly all product people will face at least one situation where they’ll realize the only way of avoiding becoming an impostor is to start looking for a new job. Learning early on that not everything can be solved through individual action is a powerful mechanism for product managers to develop. 

Learn more: What is Stakeholder Management? A Guide for Product Managers

How to continue building your product management skills

One of the most popular Reddit product management subthreads this year is actually a visual guide to some of the most relevant books for PMs. 

The guide features quite a few PM classics, including the Cagan trilogy, but since it’s broken down into different sections and subsections, it provides a very manageable overview, both for novice and more experienced PMs.

Why is this good advice? While there is no shortage of reading lists out there, it is not so common to find one presented in a way that does not deter the future reader from even getting started. It can be very intimidating getting 100+ titles to browse from and be left with little idea on where to begin. 

Learn more: The 15 Best Product Management Books for Beginners

Beyond the proposed readings above, the greater question most product managers will face after working in product for a while is: How can I get better? And, the secondary, but not less relevant question: How can I leverage my achievements to ensure I can move up the career ladder? So here are two separate Reddit product management subthreads written by veterans (a decade of experience each in product) worth taking a look at.

The first subthread is a bulletpoint list featuring 9 lessons learned after 10 years as a product manager. It stands out from the average Reddit subthread because it’s long, well structured (the summary section is right on top, so users can choose to just read it and stop there if the content does not feel particularly relevant to them) and, last but not least, it’s written in a very intuitive way. First lesson: always separate the problem from the solution. Second lesson: most people don’t understand what your job is. Last lesson: don’t be a perfectionist. These three lessons alone will go a long way in reducing work-related stress.

The second example of product wisdom in this Reddit thread about product management is presented as a 15 point “cheat sheet”. Like in the previous example, the layout is very concise and not particularly demanding. The first point makes for a strong opening: don’t believe the saying that a PM is the CEO of a product.

Other points further down reinforce the idea that a PM doesn’t have to be, after all, invincible: a product manager cannot be expected to know everything, but should know when to ask for help, shying away from making decisions isn’t going to help anyone and don’t be conflict avoidant (just learn how to pick your battles).

Why is this good advice? It’s not necessarily easy to have access to unfiltered advice from people who have learnt it the hard way over the years. It’s much easier to get experienced product managers to talk about applied topics (what’s the best way to build a roadmap, what’s your favorite framework, etc) than getting them to share their reflections about the realities of the job. Both subthreads do that, in a clear cut way.

4. Final thoughts

Is it possible to find useful advice about product management on Reddit? The short answer is, yes, it is.

Whether users flock to Reddit because they are considering making a move into product management or are making their way through job interviews, or are looking for help navigating the typical dilemmas a PM is likely to face, there is advice worth reading there.

Good advice tends to recognize the importance of placing questions within a context and it is both actionable and backed up, either by experience or data. When looking to source the most useful advice, readers would be advised to take most statements with a pinch of salt, and to exercise their own judgment.

If you’re considering or only just getting started in the rich realm of product management, one place you can always rely on good advice is from seasoned experts. That’s why CareerFoundry’s Product Management Program is not only build on the foundation of a curriculum created by product pros, but students benefit from the Dual Mentorship model of a tutor and mentor who are both experienced product managers.

Just want to dip your toe and see if it’s for you? Then try this free product management short course on for size. Ready to learn more? Check out these articles:

• How to become a product manager
• What skills does a product manager need?
• What is an AI Product Manager? A Beginner’s Guide

How can they objectively decide which tasks to allocate time and resources immediately and which can wait?

Enter the RICE Model with its RICE scores—a handy framework to navigate a labyrinthine list of priorities.  

Let’s dive deeper into this model, explore how it works, and understand why product managers should start implementing it in their workflows. We’ll be talking about:

1. What is the RICE model?
2. Understanding the RICE Score
3. Advantages of using the RICE model
4. Comparing RICE vs. other prioritization frameworks
5. Exploring drawbacks of RICE
6. Best practices to use RICE effectively

1. What is the RICE model?

The RICE model is a prioritization framework enabling product or project managers to prioritize roadmap items according to four components: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, forming the acronym RICE. 

Let’s dig into each of these in detail:

Reach

Reach is a quantifiable measure of how many customers will benefit from a particular feature. It helps project managers understand the importance of a feature from the users’ perspective. 

Project managers often add or remove new features based on various feedback, surveys, and internal assessments, resulting in a massive list of roadmap items.  The Reach score estimates the number of users a specific feature affects in a given period.  

Example: Surveys may indicate some users require in-app alerts while performing certain functions. The Reach score establishes that although some may want this feature, others find it intrusive. Hence, this item may be shelved from the roadmap due to a low Reach score. 

Impact

Impact is the measurable influence a particular influence has on the users. It helps PMs understand if a specific feature impacts user satisfaction, company revenue, and customer retention. 

Impact is usually scored on a scale of five, ranging from minimal (0.25), low (0.5), medium (1), high (2) and massive (3). If an item on the roadmap list scores high, PMs prioritize it. For example, if feedback surveys reveal a user demand for dark mode, and the subsequent Impact analysis reveals a score of 0.5, the PM may choose to downgrade this item on the priority list. 

Confidence

Confidence is a metric that helps product managers understand the accuracy of the predicted Reach, Impact, and Effort scores. 

Project managers assign percentage figures to quantify the predictive value of the other three metrics. This helps product managers to know if they are going on the right track while removing or moving up an item on the roadmap.

For example, PMs may assign an overall 80% confidence level for Reach, Impact, and Effort, which suggests a medium probability of all three predictions coming true. The percentages may vary among the three metrics, which results in more deliberations and decisions. 

Effort

Effort is the total work, resources, and time required to complete a project. Quantifying the effort helps PMs know how valuable a feature is and if it is worth going forward with it. 

Effort is usually measured in terms of person-hours or person-months. If the Effort score is less, it implies that the project can be completed quickly.

Here’s an example: If a particular item on the roadmap has 78 person-hours and the impact is 2, PMs may consider looking at the overall RICE score before deciding to put it on the priority list. 

Now let’s go a step further and see what the RICE score is. 

2. Understanding the RICE Score

A vital component of the RICE model is the RICE score. Product managers can confidently place roadmap items on a hierarchy based on quantifiable attributes across four parameters using this score.  

RICE score is widely used to get well-rounded answers to questions like: 

• How many people will benefit from a particular feature
• What a new feature’s impact will potentially be
• How much effort will be required to achieve specific goals?  

How to calculate the RICE Score

Once product managers assign numerical values to the different RICE components, the next step is estimating the RICE Score. This score can be obtained as the product of the scores assigned to Reach, Impact, and Confidence factors, dividing this product by the Effort score. 

RICE Score = (Reach*Impact*Confidence)/Effort

Higher RICE scores indicate projects or features that offer a more significant impact relative to the effort required. Thus, using this score, PMs can prioritize initiatives objectively.

To get started on building one of these yourself, there’s a lot of help out there. Tools such as Miro have handy RICE templates which you can immediately start customizing.

3. Advantages of using the RICE model

Using the RICE model reveals several advantages for product managers. Here are a few:

• Brings structure: The model brings structure to the items on a roadmap by giving each of them a quantifiable score. This enables PMs to move up or down a priority list more objectively.
• Introduces clarity: RICE scores help PMs clarify the disparate number of items on a roadmap, enabling them to make better decisions.
• Aid in avoiding gaps: Clear decision-making results in accurate resource allocation to high-priority items. This limits the occurrence of financial or temporal gaps. 
• Supports flexibility and scalability: As RICE borrows from the Agile framework, it is flexible and scalable. Depending on the circumstances and project complexities, it can be changed. This helps mitigate various risks and ensure that everything aligns with larger objectives. 

To summarize, the RICE framework, with its RICE score, empowers PMs to make objective and strategic decisions that align efforts with business objectives. But is RICE the best prioritization framework out there? Let’s compare it with other prioritization models to learn about situations where it’s the holy grail and others where better alternatives could exist. 

4. Comparing RICE vs. other prioritization frameworks

RICE vs. WSJF

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a popular prioritization model that considers the economic benefit of items. It is part of the agile framework and is widely used by finance managers and those who allocate budgets to product improvements. 

Unlike RICE, the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) model takes the value and time required to complete a task. The focus is more on time criticality and risk reduction. Hence, there is a chance of crucial factors such as Reach and Impact being ignored. 

RICE vs. AARRR

The AARRR framework consists of five metrics: Acquisition of users, Activation of users (proportion of users who experience products positively), Retention, Referral, and Revenue. This prioritization framework focuses on how users perceive items on a roadmap and often misses the items’ technological and financial aspects. 

Like RICE, the AARRR or Pirate Metrics Framework tracks user behavior, identifies metrics that matter and uses only the most relevant data to move further in project management. However, it places a greater emphasis on influencing user behavior rather than considering technical and financial feasibility. In this respect, RICE’s Reach and Impact metrics win over the AARRR framework. 

RICE vs. SMART framework

The SMART framework helps product managers set clear and attainable goals in terms of product management. It considers five metrics: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Although this is a more technology-oriented framework, it often misses the user’s point of view. 

In that sense, RICE is more complex and comprehensive than SMART frameworks. SMART does not consider the reach and impact as RICE does and instead focuses on the timeliness of project completion. 

In conclusion, most project management frameworks consider valuable metrics such as timeliness of completion, user behavior, and prioritization based on the shortest completion time. All these are essential factors, but they miss out on the Reach and Impact metrics central to the RICE framework. This helps PMs prioritize items on a roadmap more comprehensively and realistically than other frameworks. 

5. Exploring drawbacks of RICE

Although RICE is quite a robust framework for prioritizing items on roadmaps, relying on the RICE score can have certain disadvantages:

• Time-consuming: RICE can be challenging to use for complex roadmaps. Conducting surveys and research to understand Reach, tracking user satisfaction, revenue, and other metrics to understand impact, etc., can all take quite a lot of time.  
• May be subjective: How RICE is implemented often depends on the PM in charge. While some PMs may prioritize the Reach of the product, others may prioritize the Impact. Although the overall RICE score addresses these biases, there is always room for subjective interpretation. 
• May be prone to errors: RICE-derived insights may be faulty if data is not accurate.

There are several things you can do to make sure that the RICE prioritization framework is thriving. Let’s explore them now.

6. Best practices to use RICE effectively

As a product manager, you might wonder how to use the RICE framework effectively. Here are some best practices:

• Identify the items on the roadmap Although this needn’t be stated, many PMs take items on roadmaps for granted and haphazardly make a list. Facts, opinions, and decisions should always be made based on insights derived from customer surveys, user feedback, technical inputs, and other sources.
• Derive hypotheses Before implementing RICE, it’s best to derive one or more assumptions that clearly state the problems at hand and what needs to be achieved at the end of the roadmap.
• Identify data sources and methods Much like any research project, RICE requires ascertaining objective data sources to assign RICE scores. This ensures that there is no room for bias or prejudices. Examples include surveys, feedback forms, experiments, user behavior analytics, etc. These can help you estimate reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
• Quantify RICE based on agreed-upon scores Make sure that scoring RICE is not a single PM’s decision. Instead, make sure to involve multiple stakeholders so that soaring is consistent and objective.
• Measure and track the RICE framework As with any product management framework and prioritization exercise, your RICE scores can change abruptly due to evolving trends and data. Hence, it is essential to keep track of changes to data and consider them while assigning scores and moving items up and down the list of your roadmap. 

7. Bottom line: Ensure context is king when using the RICE model

As a product manager, it’s crucial to remember there’s no single best way to approach a problem.

It’s best if you consider various factors when developing a product or changing existing features. These include changing user behaviors, evolving user trends, rapidly shifting technologies, and contrasting interests of multiple stakeholders. With all these factors in mind, being open-minded and using the most suitable prioritization framework to move items up and down the roadmap list is essential. 

RICE is one of the most comprehensive frameworks to help you prioritize things on a roadmap. However, it has its drawbacks. It can get complex, needing to be more amenable to changes in data and being challenging to use in situations involving multiple stakeholders. Nevertheless, when used correctly, it can help you prioritize items on a roadmap efficiently to achieve project completion on time. 

If you found this topic interesting and want to learn more about navigating a successful product management career, sign up for CareerFoundry’s free Product Management for Beginners short course.

Here are some additional resources to explore: 

• What Is the Product Management Process? A Complete Guide
• Prioritization: 13 Great Ways Product Managers Can Do It
• The Complete  Product Roadmap Guide for Beginners

In their Jobs on the Rise report, LinkedIn ranked product manager as one of the most promising jobs in the United States. And, in the last two years alone, there has been an estimated 26% growth in mid-level product management roles and a 51% growth in senior roles.

It’s no wonder that more and more professionals are pursuing an exciting, well-paid, and future-proof career in product management. At the same time, we’re seeing a growing number of product management courses cropping up on the market. 

This is all great news for those looking to become a product manager. Just be sure to do your research before enrolling on a product management course. If you’re still weighing up whether or not it’s the right career path for you, we’ve created a free short course which offers a low-commitment way to find out.

To help you get started, we’ve selected our top picks based on extensive market research, including both free and paid options:

1. Product Management Program by CareerFoundry
2. Introduction to Product Management by Cognitir
3. Product Toolkit by Product Lessons
4. Product Management First Steps by LinkedIn Learning
5. Product Manager Certification Course by Product School
6. Product Management A-Z by Udemy
7. Product Management Course by BrainStation
8. Online Product Management Course by General Assembly
9. Free Product Management Course by Great Learning Academy
10. Product Manager Nanodegree by Udacity

Which product management course will you go for? Keep reading to learn more about our favorites. 

1.Product Management Program by CareerFoundry

One of the leading career-change schools out there, CareerFoundry is offering is a fully mentored product management course. Fully online, it comes with the option of completing it in 3 months at 30-40 hrs/week, or studying flexibly, up to 6 months at 15-20 hrs/week.

Essentially, the CareerFoundry Product Management Program is aimed at beginners looking to emerge a job-ready product manager with a dedicated support system to help you along the way. You’ll learn the skills, tools, and responsibilities that professional PMs are expected to know in 2024.

The overall cost is $6,900, however the cost of the tuition is dependent on your location and is competitively priced, as well as being backed by a job guarantee.

2.Introduction to Product Management by Cognitir

A lightweight and affordable option for dipping into product management is Cognitir’s Introduction to Product Management course.

This online course takes around 12 hours to complete and has been designed with complete beginners in mind. The curriculum is divided into nine chapters, spanning topics such as the role of the product manager, software development methodologies, and the product manager job search.

You’ll be exposed to key practices such as A/B testing, wireframing, and leading user interviews, and you’ll try your hand at some of the most popular product management tools. Students also complete an in-class project to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for their own business idea. 

The Cognitir product management course offers a collaborative learning environment, giving you the opportunity to discuss product management topics with fellow students and an expert instructor. 

Access to the course costs $49 USD per month, and you’ll get a certificate of completion at the end.

3. Product Toolkit by Product Lessons

Third up is Product Lessons, a learning and resources hub founded by Linda Zhang, an expert product manager with experience at Microsoft, Bain & Company, and Snap Inc. 

The Product Toolkit isn’t your average product management course. It comes with 76 lessons, 70 examples, 28 templates, and 11 videos—an all-encompassing and highly actionable toolbox ideal for both aspiring product managers and existing product leaders who want to level up their skills. 

You can try a few lessons for free, or sign up for lifetime access with one of three paid plans. The Starter Kit costs $119 USD, the Essentials Kit costs $179, and the Premium Kit (which includes 60 minutes of 1:1 coaching to tailor the course materials to your exact needs) costs $499. 

4. Product Management First Steps by LinkedIn Learning

If you’re a fan of LinkedIn Learning (or just want an affordable and not-too-intensive approach to learning product management), consider Product Management First Steps led by Doug Winnie, former Principal Product Manager at Adobe. 

This is a beginner-level course which takes just under two hours to complete. There are eight core modules designed to give you a comprehensive overview of all things product management, including the day-to-day activities of a product manager, the skills every successful product manager needs, as well as the key stages in the product life cycle. 

You can learn on-demand and on the go, and test your knowledge with quizzes along the way. At the end, you’ll get a shareable certificate of completion which you can add to your LinkedIn profile as proof of your new skills. 

Priced at $29.99 USD, this is one of the more affordable product management courses on the market. 

5. Product Manager Certification Course by Product School

Are you looking for a product management course with the goal of forging a career in the field? Then consider the Product Manager Certification Course offered by Product School. This comprehensive online course promises to equip you with everything you need to not only land your first product manager job, but to deliver results and prove yourself to your new employer. 

The course costs $4,499 USD and takes 5 days to complete on a full-time basis or 8 weeks on a part-time basis, comprising 32.5 hours of live, online instructor-led lessons. After enrolling, you’ll unlock your access to on-demand videos, templates, and tools, and you’ll be part of a student forum. The curriculum itself includes group activities and a final project (a product presentation which you’ll give in the last lesson). 

This is a great course for those looking to learn practical product management skills and obtain a professional certification in the field. 

6. Product Management A-Z by Udemy

Another lightweight and not-too-pricey option is the Product Management A-Z course available on the popular platform Udemy.

The course comprises 4.5 hours of on-demand video, one downloadable resource, and six articles, as well as practical assignments and a certificate of completion at the end. The content is geared towards beginners, starting from the basics of what product management is and what a product manager does, before moving on to job-specific skills and tools such as user research, specs, user stories, product roadmaps, and more. 

The final part of the curriculum focuses on how to prepare for a product management interview. However, don’t expect to land a job off the back of this course alone; view it as an introduction to the field. 

The standard course price is $19.99 USD, although they often have discounts on so you can likely get your hands on it for less. 

7. Product Management Course by BrainStation

If you’re an aspiring product manager ready to make a more substantial investment in a course, BrainStation offers an online program for $3,250 USD. 

The BrainStation product management course promises to teach cutting-edge skills in product strategy, Agile methodology, Lean product development, wireframing, prototyping, and more to help you become a qualified product manager. You’ll attend live online classes led by industry experts, join breakout sessions to complete group projects, and connect with fellow learners via the BrainStation Slack community. 

As you work through the course, you’ll also build your product management portfolio—a crucial asset when it comes to demonstrating your skills to employers. 

The BrainStation course takes between 5 and 10 weeks to complete depending on your chosen pace. 

8. Online Product Management Course by General Assembly

Whether you want to study intensively over a short period of time or at a steady pace alongside your job, General Assembly’s online product management course offers an immersive and practical route into the field. 

If you opt for the full-time pace, you’ll attend online classes for a week (Monday to Saturday, 9am-5pm). If you choose the part-time course, you’ll attend four hours of classes spread over two evenings a week, over the course of ten weeks. 

Whichever format you go for, you’ll learn the most in-demand product management skills with a focus on Agile best practices, stakeholder management, and data-driven decision-making. You’ll also complete a practical project as part of the course, giving you your first case study for your product management portfolio. 

The General Assembly product management course costs $3,950 USD with a range of payment plans and financing options available. 

9. Free Product Management Course by Great Learning Academy

If you’re keen to start learning product management but aren’t ready to commit to a paid course, this free product management course offered by Great Learning Academy is an excellent entry point. 

Ideal for beginners, the course starts with the basics of product management before moving through to more advanced topics such as the product life cycle, developing a product management strategy, and product innovation. The course also includes a module on the role of a product manager so you’ll know exactly what to expect if you’re considering a career in the field.

You can complete the course online, at your own pace, in approximately 2-3 hours. This free course won’t equip you to get a job as a product manager, but it will give you a solid introduction to the industry. 

If you enjoy the free course, Great Learning Academy also offers a more comprehensive PG Program in Product Management and Analytics.

10. Product Manager Nanodegree by Udacity

Our final option is another one from a popular provider of online courses, Udacity.

The Udacity Product Manager Nanodegree is a comprehensive course that pledges to teach you the skills you need to become a successful product manager.

The nanodegree is broken up into four product management courses:

1. Introduction
2. Product strategy
3. Product design
4. Product development

As you can see, each section focusses on an area of the product development process where PMs will be getting involved. The courses give you an idea of how each area works, and what is expected of the product manager when working there. The program is taught by experienced product managers from Google and other leading companies.

You can pay for the Udacity subscription month-to-month at a cost of $249, but you can buy 4 months (the recommended length of time) in one go at a 15% discount of $846.

Wrap-up

So there you have it: a selection of the best product management courses currently available on the market. By now you should have a good idea of the options out there and what they can offer to you.

The next step involves doing further research, and a bit of self-examination: What kind of factors are important to you when choosing a course? It could be your learning style (videos vs live lectures vs reading materials), how you are motivated (self-motivated vs having accountability), as well as resources such as free time and, naturally, money.

Once you’ve worked out what is best for you, then dig deeper into your shortlist of possible product management courses, investigate their reviews, check out where their graduates work now, and reach out to them.

The next steps is to book a chat with a program advisor to have any further burning questions answered, as well as guidance on your path.

Want to learn more about starting a career in product management? Continue with these handy guides:

• How To Get a Product Management Certification
• What Is the Typical Career Path of a Product Manager?
• What is Scrum? A Simple 2024 Guide for Product Managers

If you’re considering a career as a product manager, you’re probably wondering: what are the exact skills you’ll need to be successful in the role?

Look no further. In this post, we set out the 12 most important skills that employers look for when hiring a product manager.

Start honing the skills on our list and you’ll be well on your way to a successful career in the field. First, though, let’s briefly recap what product management is, and what a product manager actually does.

If you’d like to skip ahead to a certain section, just use the clickable menu:

1. What is product management, and what does a product manager do?
2. The top 12 most important product manager skills
   • Technical expertise
   • An understanding of UX
   • Business savvy
   • Critical thinking
   • The ability to analyze and interpret data
   • Research skills
   • Problem-solving
   • The ability to prioritize
   • How to use AI tools
   • Strategic thinking
   • Communication skills
   • A knack for storytelling
3. How to learn the most important product manager skills
   • Product manager soft skills
   • Technical product manager skills
4. Final thoughts
5. Product manager skills FAQ

1. What is product management, and what does a product manager do?

Product management is the function within an organization that’s responsible for the overall success of a product. It sits at the intersection of business, UX, and technology, with the goal of driving innovation and growth—while also keeping the end user happy.

The product manager takes on a strategic role, developing an overall vision for the product—as well as a plan for how that vision will be realized. They work cross-functionally to ensure that everybody’s aligned and working towards a common goal. This requires them to wear many hats, and to be in tune with the needs and perspectives of both the end user and of multiple stakeholders within the organization.

You can learn more about what product management is in our complete introductory guide. Now, though, let’s consider those all-important skills you’ll need to demonstrate if you want to become a product manager. 

2. The top 12 most important product manager skills

1. Technical expertise

Product managers don’t need to be able to code, but they do need a good handle on the technical side of the product development process.

As a product manager, you’ll work closely with web developers to ensure the product is built and tested according to the specifications you’ve set out for them. It’s therefore necessary to have an understanding of the web development process, and of the technology behind your product.

Learn how to speak the developers’ language and you’ll be well-positioned to collaborate with engineering teams—a crucial aspect of the product manager role. 

2. An understanding of UX

It’s the product manager’s job to bring products to market that generate value for the business and serve the end user/customer. They advocate for the user at every stage of the product life cycle, collaborating closely with UX designers and researchers along the way.

Again, as a product manager, you don’t need to be an expert UX designer yourself—but you do need a thorough understanding of user experience principles, best practices, and processes.

This will help you to communicate product requirements more effectively, to understand the time-intensity and complexity of different design-related tasks, and to generally foster better collaboration with the design team. Not only that: having a good understanding of UX will enable you to bring a user-first approach to your own work. 

Want to learn more about UX? Start with this introductory guide to user experience design. 

3. Business savvy

Product managers occupy a strategic role, developing a vision for the product that aligns with business goals. To do this, they need a good dose of business acumen.

It’s important to understand how all the different areas of business work together to drive success, to have a grip on things like budgeting, cash flow, and profit margin, and to be well-versed in company metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). Having a good head for business also means being able to see the “big picture” and relate smaller, on-the-ground actions back to the overarching strategy.

Acquiring this business acumen takes time, but you can do it in almost any role, at any stage of your career. If you’re currently working in an organization of any kind, make an effort to understand what factors are driving the success of the company, how success is being measured, and the role that each department plays. This will set you in good stead for a career in product management. 

4. Critical thinking 

In their day-to-day work, product managers must constantly make decisions about the product, the strategy, and the allocation of time and resources—all while weighing up what’s best for the business and the user at once. This requires excellent critical thinking skills. 

Critical thinking can be described as the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgment. Most of us apply critical thinking everyday without even realizing—which means you probably already possess this crucial product management skill.

Want to hone this skill further and become a better product manager? Try these seven techniques to improve your critical thinking.

5. The ability to analyze and interpret data

As with virtually any role in business nowadays, product management is highly data-driven. The best product managers are able to analyze different types of data and use their findings to make smart decisions.

Product managers use data and analytics to understand the market they’re competing in,to see how users behave, to test different versions of a product or feature, to uncover issues with the product, and to measure performance and progress against relevant KPIs.

Bear in mind that you don’t need to be an expert data scientist or data analyst. As long as you have a foundational understanding of data and know how to glean useful insights from it, you’ll be well set up for a role in product management.

6. Research skills

To lead the development of successful products, product managers must know their market inside-out. A key part of the job involves conducting research: research into market and industry trends, research into competing products, and research into the target user base.

This enables product managers to identify opportunities for growth and to anticipate potential threats to the product’s success. To succeed in the role, you’ll need to remain curious and continuously run your own research to stay ahead of the curve. This is particularly important for PMs who are involved in product discovery.

7. Problem-solving

Product managers are excellent problem-solvers. It’s the very foundation of what they do: create products that solve real user problems. 

This doesn’t only apply to coming up with new product and feature ideas. You’ll also need to problem-solve internally, coming up with solutions to improve processes and finding workarounds for various challenges (such as a lack of time or resources). 

A problem-solving mindset is crucial throughout the product life cycle, and for juggling internal product operations. Fortunately, this is a highly transferable skill that you’ve no doubt already developed in one context or another. 

Want to tap into your problem-solving potential? Here are six ways to enhance your problem-solving skills in everyday life.

8. The ability to prioritize

How do product managers make sure that everybody’s working on the right things at the right time, and that goals and deadlines are met? Through robust prioritization. 

As a product manager, you’ll soon notice that ideas, requests, and suggestions come at you from all angles. You can’t implement everything, so it’s your job to determine what’s a high priority and what belongs on the backburner. Often, this will require you to put your foot down and deliver unwelcome decisions—decisions that might be met with disappointment or frustration. 

So: not only do you need to be able to prioritize; you need to be ready to explain your reasons for doing so. 

Learn all about how successful PMs do this in our complete guide to prioritization.

9. How to use AI tools

In 2024, not every PM will magically become an AI product manager, with all of the machine learning knowledge that that role requires.

However, after a year of generative AI and LLMs being integrated into all kinds of tools, including project and product management ones. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re applying for a junior product manager role or something more senior, it’s expected that you should be able to harness the power of AI to work smarter.

You can check out some of the best of these in our guide to AI product management tools, or if you’re in more of a hurry and just want to work with ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, we’ve created a cheatsheet of 22 product management prompts to use.

Remember, knowing how to use AI as a product manager this year isn’t just about knowing how to use the tools functionally, it’s also about being able to employ them responsibly and ethically, as well.

10. Strategic thinking

Everything the product manager does must be done with the overall strategy in mind. Strategic thinking informs how you make decisions and set priorities, how you define the vision for the product, and how you set goals to make that vision a reality. 

But what exactly does it mean to “think strategically”? Ultimately, it’s about keeping your eye on the bigger picture. If you’re a strategic thinker, you don’t make decisions just to benefit the here and now; you think ahead to the end goal. You consider how your work impacts the company as a whole, and you seek to drive the entire organization to success. 

Strategic thinking underpins the entire product management process, so you can’t get by without it.

11. Communication skills

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of communication skills for product managers. 

Building and launching a successful product requires input from all kinds of departments and experts—from designers and developers to sales, marketing, and customer service teams. And guess who’s the star player when it comes to aligning all these different teams? That’s right: the product manager. 

Not a day will go by when you’re not answering questions, facilitating a meeting, having catch-ups, or presenting to stakeholders. Excellent communication skills are a must, and it’s essential that you’re able to use this skill with confidence and empathy. This includes being an active and engaged listener—communication should always be a two-way street. 

12. A knack for storytelling

Last but not least, the most successful product managers are excellent storytellers. 

As a product manager, you need to ensure that everybody’s aligned and working towards the same goal. Sure, you can simply  share the product roadmap and have everybody play their part. But, to get true buy-in, you need people to actually understand and believe in the product vision as much as you do.  

If you can convincingly tell the story of your product—why you’re building it, who you’re building it for, and the problems it’ll solve—you’ll help people to see why it matters. From there, you’ll get their passion, enthusiasm, and their best work. 

Further down the line, you’ll also need product storytelling to successfully launch the product and get buy-in from customers, too. You can learn more about why product managers need to be great storytellers in this post, and pick up some product storytelling techniques of your own.

3. How to learn the most important product management skills

There you have it: the most important skills and traits of a successful product manager. So what’s the best way to go about learning these skills?

Product manager soft skills

Many of the skills on our list are what we call soft skills. Soft skills are extremely important, but they aren’t unique to a specific job or field. This includes things like communication, strategic thinking, and problem-solving.

You can actually develop these skills in almost any role, and then transfer them to a new discipline. Look for opportunities in your current job to develop these soft skills (you’ve probably got many of them down already!) and consider how you’ll apply them in the context of product management.

Technical product manager skills

As for the hard skills—those more technical, role-specific competencies—you’ll need a more focused learning path. The most effective way to learn core product management skills and get qualified for a job in the field is through a professional product management course or certification.

As well as a set of skills, it’s important to note that this has evolved into an important role itself. You can learn more about it in our guide to the technical product manager role.

4. Final thoughts

So there you have it, the must-have skills product managers will need in 2023. Check how many of them are in your skillset, and then plan how you can go about adding the other strings to your bow through courses or tutorials.

Still not 100% sure if this is the path for you? Try it out first with a free introductory product management short course. You’ll get a hands-on introduction to the profession, learning about everything from strategy and design to Agile methodology. In a nutshell, the course will give you the tools and understanding you need to start your career in this field.

And, if you’re intent on making a career change and landing a job in the field, it’s worth checking out the full CareerFoundry Product Management Program. This fully mentored course will guide you through a structured learning path, equip you with the hands-on skills employers are looking for, and leave you with a professional-quality portfolio to demonstrate your expertise.

You can continue learning about product management with these articles:

• How much does a product manager earn? Our complete salary guide
• What’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner?
• 13 of the best product management tools for your stack

5. Product manager skills FAQ

Is product management a soft skill?

Product management is a field, not a skill. It’s a dynamic field that requires a blend of soft skills (communication, problem-solving, empathy) and hard skills (technical understanding, analytical prowess) to effectively manage the product lifecycle from ideation to launch and beyond.

Do you need tech skills to be a product manager?

Although technical skills aren’t a prerequisite for product management, having a basic understanding of technology allows product managers to collaborate seamlessly with software developers and engineers, understand product requirements, and make informed decisions regarding features and design.

What is the core skill of a product manager?

The core skill of a product manager lies in balancing business objectives with user needs. This necessitates the ability to grasp market trends, analyze user behavior, and incorporate customer feedback to ensure that products align with both business goals and user expectations.

What skills do you need to be a full-stack product manager?

Full-stack product managers bridge the gap between the technical and business aspects of product development. They possess the technical expertise to understand and articulate product requirements, as well as the business acumen to assess market opportunities, prioritize features, and strategize product launches.

What is the critical skill of product management?

A critical skill for product management is the ability to make data-driven decisions. This involves gathering and analyzing user data, identifying patterns and insights, and using these findings to optimize products, enhance user experiences, and drive business success.

But what about the salary? Are product managers well-paid? In a word, yes—and you’ll find all the data to back it up in this guide. Just use the clickable menu to find the product manager salary data you’re most interested in:

1. What is product management, and what does a product manager do?
2. What is the average product manager salary in the United States?
3. How much do product managers earn around the world?
4. Product manager salaries based on seniority
5. Which companies pay the highest product management salaries?
6. How to get started in product management

Ready to find out how much you could earn as a product manager? Let’s go. 

1. What is product management, and what does a product manager do?

Before we explore product manager salaries, let’s briefly recap on what product management is and what a product manager actually does. 

Product management can be defined as the department or function within an organization which is responsible for ensuring the overall success of a product or service. It entails everything that falls under the product life cycle—from discovering the product to developing, launching, growing it, and beyond. 

Product management is a strategic function, so it’s all about managing the product (or service) in a way that drives business growth. Product managers are responsible for defining a product vision and developing a roadmap for how that vision will be implemented.

They work with a variety of different stakeholders to ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards a common goal. Much of a product manager’s day-to-day work revolves around:

• gathering and prioritizing ideas
• defining technical requirements
• presenting to leadership
• conducting research
• running experiments to identify opportunities for improvement

As you can see, the role of the product manager is extremely varied, requiring a broad and diverse skillset. We’ve outlined the 11 most important product manager skills in this guide.

For now, though, let’s get to the matter at hand: How much can product managers really earn? 

2. What is the average product manager salary in the United States?

The average salary for a product manager in the United States is $116,963, according to data from Indeed. They also report an average yearly cash bonus on top of that of $5,000 for product managers. 

This is double the average salary in the U.S., which stands at $53,490 in Dec 2023.

The product manager salary varies depending on where you are in the U.S. Let’s take a look at what product managers typically earn in different locations (ordered from highest to lowest). We’ve taken all salary data from Indeed:

• San Francisco, CA: $182,675
• New York, NY: $115,000
  
• Seattle, WA: $100,000
• Los Angeles, CA: $98,000 
• Chicago, IL: $97,000
• Denver, CO: $95,000
• Minneapolis, MN: $94,000
• Atlanta, GA: $94,000
• Boston, NY: $93,000
• Dallas, TX: $93,000

As you can see, product managers earn consistently well across the United States. If you’d like to get salary data for a different location, check the Indeed salary portal. 

3. How much do product managers earn around the world?

Now let’s consider how much product managers can earn outside of the U.S..

The average product manager salary in the UK & Ireland

The average salary for a product manager in the UK is £55,272 per year (Indeed). This is around £20,000 higher than the national average salary of £29,600 per year. 

The average salary for a product manager in Ireland is €65,303 per year (Indeed). This is over €30,000 higher than the national average salary of €44,202. 

Here’s what the average product manager salary looks like broken down by city, all based on data from Indeed:

• Dublin: €79,466
• London: £58,472
• Cardiff: £56,299
• Edinburgh: £52,448
• Belfast: £50,705

Product manager salaries in other European countries

Here we’ll look at the average product manager salary in different countries across Europe:

• Switzerland: 177,000 CHF (around €169,400). The national average salary in Switzerland is about 124,000 CHF. 
• France: €66,900. The national average salary in France is €49,500. 
• Austria: €63,900. The national average salary in Austria is around €45,500.
• Germany: €70,394. The national average salary in Germany is €45,700.
• Spain: €45,700. The national average salary in Spain is around €32,600.
• Italy: €42,392. The national average salary in Italy is around €43,800.

The average product manager salary in Australia

The average base salary for a product manager in Australia is $118,652 per year (Indeed). That’s over $50,000 higher than the national average salary which stands at around $67,000 per year. 

Now let’s take a look at how much product managers typically earn in different Australian cities:

• Canberra, ACT: $263,309
• Brisbane, QLD: $127,840
• Perth, WA: $127,313
• Sydney, NSW: $126,780
• Melbourne, VIC: $113,558

The average product manager salary in Canada

The average product manager salary in Canada is CA $92,804 per year. This is a good $30,000 more than the national average salary of $54,630.

How do product managers fare in different Canadian cities? Let’s find out:

• Vancouver, BC: $97,421
• Toronto, ON: $92,229
• Calgary, AB: $90,942
• Montréal, QC: $83,570
• Québec, QC: $71,129

The average product manager salary in India

In India, the average product manager salary is ₹11,48,889 per year (around US$13,000). This is considerably higher than the national average salary of ₹3,87,500 per year (around US$5,000). 

Here’s how the product manager salary varies across different Indian cities:

• Bengaluru: ₹11,84,102 (around $15,300)
• Mumbai: ₹10,40,468 (around $13,400)
• Hyderabad: ₹9,50,408 (around $12,300)
• Jaipur: ₹8,81,011 (around $11,300)
• Delhi: ₹8,69,617 (around $11,200)

The average product manager salary in New Zealand

The average salary for a product manager in New Zealand is NZ $136,208 per year, based on data from talent.com. This is considerably higher than the national average salary of NZ $58,836 per year.

Now let’s explore the product manager salary for different cities in New Zealand, based on data from Glassdoor:

• Wellington: $110,000
• Christchurch: $105,000 
• Hamilton: $101,000 
• Auckland: $100,000 

The average product manager salary in Nigeria

According to salaryexplorer.com, the average salary for a product manager in Nigeria is 5,850,000 NGN per year (around $14,100). This is considerably higher than the national average salary of 4,060,000 NGN per year (around $9,800). 

The average product manager salary in South Africa

Based on data from Indeed, the average base salary for a product manager in South Africa is ZAR 575 447 per year (around $34,000). The national average salary stands at ZAR 374,000, putting product managers comfortably in the above-average category. 

The average product manager salary in Brazil

In Brazil, product managers earn an average salary of 145,000 BRL per year (around $28,300). This is significantly higher than the national average salary of 103,000 BRL.

We’ve only explored a handful of countries and cities, but you’ve probably noticed that product managers typically earn well above the national average in most places.

If you’re curious about the average product manager salary in a location we haven’t covered, we can recommend using tools like Glassdoor, Indeed, and salaryexplorer.com to find the exact data you’re interested in.

Location is just one factor that impacts your earning potential as a product manager. Now let’s consider another important aspect: years of experience. 

4. How does a product manager’s salary vary based on seniority level?

As with any profession, the product manager salary varies based on seniority. Let’s take a look at the average salary for different product manager job titles in the United States:

• Junior product manager salary: $63,160
• Associate product manager salary: $81,534
• Senior product manager salary: $148,797
• Director of product salary: $169,649
• Principal product manager salary: $175,283
• VP of product management salary: $191,021
• Chief product officer salary: $227,922

Again, we’ve taken all of our salary data from Indeed. You can see how, as you gain more experience in the field, your earning potential as a product manager jumps significantly.

If you’re curious as to what distinguishes a junior product manager from a senior, or a senior from a director, we recommend searching these job titles and seeing how the job descriptions differ. We’d also recommend looking at our complete product manager job description guide to learn more.

Pay attention to the skills required, as well as the responsibilities that fall under each title. You’ll soon have an idea of what it takes to progress through the product management ranks!

5. What companies pay the highest product manager salaries?

When weighing up your earning potential as a product manager, it’s also important to consider how salaries can vary across different companies.

We’ve explored the average product manager salary—which sits at just over $116,000 in the U.S.—but actually, there are some companies that pay their product managers well above the average. 

So: What companies pay the best product manager salaries? Here are the top five, data from Glassdoor:

• VMware, a cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in California. The average salary for a product manager at VMware is $233,092 per year.
• Meta (formerly known as Facebook), another major tech company based in California. The average salary for a product manager working at Meta is $294,081 per year.
• Boeing, a leading aerospace company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. On average, product managers at Boeing earn $172,409 per year.
• Oracle, one of the largest software companies in the world, with headquarters in Austin, Texas. The average product manager salary at Oracle is $216,826 per year.
• Accenture, a global professional services company specializing in information technology services and consulting. The average salary for a product manager working at Accenture is $150,437 per year. 

Also on the list of top-paying companies for product managers are Block, Google, Workday, Walmart, and Amazon, with salaries ranging from $151,000 to $216,000. 

6. How to get started in product management

If you like what you’ve seen with regards to salary, you might be wondering how you can break into this fascinating, fast-growing, and financially rewarding field.

The first step is to learn as much as you can about product management through independent reading and research. Immerse yourself in the topic through blogs, podcasts, and product management books in order to build up your foundational knowledge.

Next, you’ll want to focus on learning the practical skills that will equip you to actually work as a product manager. The most effective way to do this is through a product management course.

This will also help you to build your product management portfolio, network in the field, and effectively apply for jobs—all critical steps in your journey towards a career in product management.

You’ll find a complete step-by-step guide on how to become a product manager in this guide, where we also outline some of the most credible product management courses that are worth considering.

If you’re still figuring out if product management is right for you, try a free product management for beginners course before you invest in the real thing.

Want to read more about the world of product management first? Then check out these articles for starters:

• 13 of the best product management tools for your stack
• What’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner?
• Our in-depth guide to product owner salaries

Whether you already live in Frisco or are planning a relocation to the West Coast, here’s everything you need to know to catapult your career aspirations skyward in this electrifying city. As you navigate the vibrant San Francisco tech scene, you’ll find yourself in the heart of a technology hub renowned for innovation, thanks partly to its proximity to Silicon Valley.

While San Francisco’s tech industry has recently grappled with challenges like economic fluctuations and market shifts, the city continues to be a bountiful hub for both aspiring and seasoned product managers (PMs) seeking to thrive in their careers. In line with global trends, tech salaries in SF are on the upswing, maintaining the competitiveness of product manager salaries and reflecting the ongoing demand for exceptional talent in the region.

But what does the average product manager salary in San Francisco look like? And how do different positions within product management impact compensation? In this article, we’ll examine various aspects of product manager salaries, from associate to senior roles, and provide insights into what it’s like to work as a product manager in the City by the Bay. We’ll also share tips on how to land your dream product manager job in San Francisco. So, plug in and power up to explore the world of product management in this tech-centric part of the world.

Here’s what we’ll cover – feel free to use the clickable menu to jump to any section that interests you:

1. Product manager salaries in San Francisco
2. What’s it like to be a product manager in San Francisco?
3. How to become a product manager in San Francisco
4. How to get product manager jobs in San Francisco
5. Next steps

1. Product manager salaries in San Francisco

According to data from Glassdoor, product manager salaries in San Francisco, CA, range from $144K to $236K, with the average total compensation being $183,165. To put this in perspective, this amount is nearly triple the current US average salary of $53,490.

To better understand these numbers, let’s delve deeper into the salaries for various roles and seniority levels. Here are the compensation figures for crucial product manager positions and related job titles in SF and the Bay Area:

Associate product manager salary in San Francisco

Associate product managers in San Francisco earn an estimated total pay of $116,529 per year, with an average base salary of $107,037 per year and an estimated additional pay of $8,786. This figure includes cash bonuses, commissions, tips, and profit sharing.

Senior product manager salary in San Francisco

The total annual median pay for a senior product manager in San Francisco is $219,575, with an average salary of $165,930. Additional pay is estimated at $53,948 per annum. This means that if you’re looking to become a senior product manager, SF could be just the place for you.

Product marketing manager salary in San Francisco

Product marketing managers in the San Francisco area can expect an estimated total pay of $184,078 per year, with an average annual salary of $136,676 per year and additional pay calculated at $47,764. It’s no surprise that the role of product marketing manager is becoming a popular one.

Product manager salary in the Bay Area

There is no specific salary data for product management jobs in the Bay Area as a whole, but let’s look at two of its biggest cities, San Jose and Santa Clara. In the two adjacent cities, product managers earn a median total pay of $182,675 per year, with an average salary of $112,669. Here, the additional pay stands at $31,298.

2. What’s it like to be a product manager in San Francisco?

Undoubtedly, the Golden Gate City is one of the world’s best places for tech workers, offering a dynamic environment for product managers to work and grow in.

San Francisco’s thriving tech scene, home to renowned companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Netflix, stimulates innovation and creates an ultra-competitive market for tech talent. This high-powered atmosphere results in lucrative salaries and unparalleled networking opportunities.

Though high living costs, including steep rents, can be a concern, the competitive tech salaries in the Bay Area often offset these disadvantages to a certain extent. The city’s charm, diverse culture, stunning natural surroundings, and mild climate further contribute to its appeal to tech professionals.

For product managers seeking to make their mark in the industry, Frisco’s rich ecosystem of technological transformation, mentorship, and collaboration provides an ideal setting to develop skills, expand networks, and ultimately, excel in their careers.

3. How to become a product manager in San Francisco

If you’re serious about landing a job as a product manager in San Francisco’s tech sector, you’ll want to pay close attention to the following quick tips. For more detailed general advice, read our full-length guide: How to become a product manager?

Develop your skillset

First, you’ll need to acquire as many of the skills typically listed in product manager job descriptions as possible. These include areas like:

• business development
• customer segmentation
• market analysis
• user experience (UX) design
• project management, and
• data analytics.

To stay on top of the latest developments, consider attending networking events, reading relevant blogs, and engaging in online forums—you never know where the next big product idea might come from.

Explore training opportunities

Are you keen on becoming a product manager in San Francisco but need more experience in the field? In that case, getting professional training is crucial. While you can choose between in-person or online training, the latter usually offers more flexibility and convenience.

One excellent option is CareerFoundry’s Product Management Program, which has a comprehensive curriculum aimed at helping you master the fundamental skills, tools, and processes necessary to become a successful PM. The program also includes mentorship from industry experts, personalized feedback, and practical projects that you can use to build your portfolio.

Create a compelling portfolio

To land a product manager job in San Francisco’s competitive job market, you need a strong portfolio full of compelling case studies showcasing your diverse product development experience, design capabilities, strategy development, and implementation skills.

Check out these outstanding product manager portfolio examples for inspiration, and our guide will walk you through the essentials of building an impressive portfolio.

4. How to get product manager jobs in San Francisco

So, you’ve developed the skills you need to make it as a product manager in San Francisco, but how do you actually secure a position? Again, there are a few strategic steps you can take to increase the likelihood of success:

Optimize your LinkedIn profile

A current and professional appearance is essential. Make it easy for recruiters to find you by showcasing your product management experience and skills and strategically incorporating relevant keywords to enhance your visibility among potential employers.

Build your local network

Active engagement in local meetups, industry events, and groups is crucial. By forming connections with professionals in your field and staying informed about potential job openings, you create valuable opportunities for yourself.

Attend SF-based product events

Immersion in events like ProductWorld provides insights into the latest industry trends and expands your network through interaction with fellow professionals sharing your passion.

Find the best tech companies to work for

Thorough research on leading tech companies within the San Francisco Bay Area is a must. You’ll ensure a mutually beneficial fit by identifying potential employers and understanding their work culture and environment.

Start looking for jobs

Harnessing the potential of general job platforms like Glassdoor and niche tech job boards like BuiltInSF allows you to explore product manager openings. When you pursue positions that align with your skills and experience, you set the stage for career growth.

5. Next steps

San Francisco is a hotbed of innovation and opportunity, with product manager salaries among the highest in the country.

If you’re considering a career in product management in San Francisco, this article has covered everything you need to know, from the average salaries for different roles to what it’s like to work as a product manager in the city by the Bay. We’ve also provided tips on becoming a product manager and finding a job in this highly competitive tech metropolis.

To further your product management career, consider CareerFoundry’s free 5-day product short course, which provides an interactive experience with the fundamentals of the profession. From Agile methodology to strategy and design, you’ll have access to the resources and knowledge necessary to excel in the tech industry.

Or, if you’d rather keep reading to learn more about product management, check out these related articles:

• A Beginner’s Guide to the Director of Product Role
• The Ultimate Product Owner Salary Guide
• What is an Agile Release Train?

For those who are just now starting out in the industry, what are the names worth knowing and following? Who are the best product managers to follow online?

Here’s how we’ll break it down:

1. The veteran big names of product
2. The best product managers to follow from beyond the Valley
3. Final thoughts

1. The veteran big names of product

Quite a few of the people on this list have been calling themselves product people well before PM carved its own space in tech. They are all published authors and their books are regarded today as foundational reading for both aspiring and seasoned product managers alike. 

Marty Cagan via Silicon Valley Product Group

The Pater Emeritus of product might be fast approaching retirement age, but his influence is very far from waning.

Cagan can lay claim to having introduced the adjective “caganite”, as well as conditioning at least two generations of product managers to believe that having a background in software engineering is an essential prerequisite to working in product and to become the best product manager in the world.

Cagan has also been extremely vocal in his insistence that product management is neither project management, nor should it be confused with the role of product owner in the Agile framework known as Scrum. 

He is also the author of several books that have earned their rightful place in the canon of PM literature, namely: 

• Inspired, How To Create Tech Products That Customers Love 
• Empowered, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products 

Socials

Cagan currently runs workshops and keeps an active blog (including an archive of nearly twenty years of posts) on Silicon Valley Product Group, the product consultancy he co-founded. 

• Blog
• Linkedin

Teresa Torres

Before Teresa Torres, product discovery, one of the essential stages in the product development lifecycle, was perceived often as somewhat of a blackbox: one understood its importance, but its workings remained shrouded in a mystery that eluded all but the very best product managers.

Torres untangled Product Discovery and turned it into a quasi-science of measurements, hypotheses and continuous customer interviews, defying the previously accepted assumption that Discovery was a process done once and never repeated.

Software teams owe a great deal to Torres, since this evolution in Product Discovery also facilitated the transition from Waterfall to Agile development: if product requirements are a perpetual work in progress, then what could make more sense than building products in small increments and iterating on them as often as possible? 

Socials

• Product Talk blog
• Linkedin

Melissa Perri

Melissa Perri’s career in product really took off after the publication of her 2017 book Escaping the Building Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. The book spoke to an entire generation of producteers who had been trying (and oftentimes failing) to move from so-called feature factories to companies where product management was recognized for its real worth.

This generation had read Cagan and possibly Torres, so the idea that a product manager should be content in a position of backlog administrator, or JIRA ticket writer, simply was not enough anymore. Perri managed to put a name to this malaise, diagnose it, identify its root causes and propose a remedy: no matter how well informed PMs may be, momentous change must start at the top. 

It’s not a matter of deciding to do things differently at team level: management and executives alike must be prepared and willing to embrace a completely different mindset. Companies must become product-led before they can become the right place to forge the best product managers around. 

Socials

• Blog
• Linkedin

Lenny Rachitsky

Lenny might have been one of the first product managers to successfully “retire” from Big Tech and to launch his own paid Substack newsletter specifically focused on product management.

With over half a million subscribers, Lenny has proved that it’s possible to cultivate an audience of readers and listeners purely interested in inside stories about product and to learn from what the best product managers are working on today. .

As a former Product Lead for Growth at AirBnB, Lenny has a soft spot for challenges related to growing and monetizing a company’s service offering in the best possible way. He’s also managed to bring Silicon Valley experts to his firechats and share not only best practices, but also uncertainties and failures that ultimately made them better product managers and leaders.

Lenny’s newsletter is also uniquely neutral, in the sense that there is very little to no promotion of specific courses, schools or additional services PMs tend to be pushed towards in the name of keeping themselves updated.

In short, if you’re short on time and can only manage to read one newsletter (complete with a podcast!), consider becoming a subscriber to Lenny’s. 

Socials

• Lenny’s Newsletter
• Linkedin

2. The best product managers to follow from beyond the Valley

Even though quite a few of the luminaries of product management have lived and worked in California, not all the world’s best product managers reside in the Golden State. . 

Increasingly, there’s a consensus that the mindset and even the models and techniques used in Silicon Valley are not always easy to replicate elsewhere: the business culture might be different, the sheer size of teams might also play a role. So bearing that difference in mind, here are a couple of people who have chosen to advance the state of product management in Europe and, more specifically, in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).

Büşra Coşkuner

Büşra started out in product management as many others before her had: as an IT project manager that gradually managed to transition into a proper product role. 

She worked for a number of companies before deciding to become a solopreneur in 2019. While at first Büşra was very vocal about the key differences between product management and Scrum/Agile, her soft spot has since evolved to focus on building capable PMs for the future.

Büşra is, by her own assumption “not a blogger”, although she does publish her thoughts and expertise on LinkedIn quite often. She currently offers a variety of courses and workshops, both for companies and individuals around the topics of experimentation, hypothesis, OKRs, North Star metrics and others, touching upon both tactical and strategic matters of product management.

In short, Büşra is doing more than her fair share to ensure the best product managers of tomorrow are much more confident and have better tools than their predecessors. 

Socials

• Website
• Linkedin

Tim Herbig

Tim Herbig is unusually generous in sharing product insights: his website contains a multitude of articles and a full book on the topic of Product Discovery accessible to all. Tim himself writes and gives courses and workshops on three main topics: 

• OKRs
• Product strategy 
• Product discovery 

He builds on his experience both as a product manager and, later on, as a product advisor and coach to different companies.

Like Büşra, Tim realized during his time working in product roles in-house that there was a great deal of confusion between Agile, Scrum and what product management was supposed to be and how the best product managers were even supposed to be working…

Fed up with a style of work that included very little data and evidence-based decisions, Tim set himself up to the challenge of changing PM culture from the inside out, helping companies make the transition into becoming product-focused and product-led. 

Socials

• Website
• Linkedin

3. Final thoughts

Whether as in-house product managers, as solopreneurs, or as part of product collectives, there are countless product people working proactively to increase awareness about what it means to be a product manager, and how one can become one of the best product managers around.

And even for aspiring PMs, unsure of what they want their next step to be, any of these product influencers can provide at the very least an inspiration on current best practices. 

Ready to learn more? Check out CareerFoundry’s free product management short course. For more related reading on resources for aspiring product managers, you can refer to these articles:

• The 15 best product management books for beginners
  
• How to become a product manager: your complete step-by-step guide
• The 9 most common types of product managers

Then, you might want to explore being a product analyst. 

Lately, product analysis is turning into a popular career choice of late. Manufacturers of both physical and digital products increasingly depend on product analysts to develop new products and enhance existing ones.

If you choose to be a product analyst, you’ll be essentially tracking and monitoring a product through its life cycle. And you’ll do a lot more than that too. So, let’s learn more about this exciting career option, shall we?

Read on to know more about:

1. What does a product analyst do?
2. Product Analyst vs. Product Manager vs. Business Analyst: What’s the difference?
3. What are the skills you need to possess as a product analyst?
4. What is the average product analyst’s salary?
5. How to become a product analyst
6. Product analyst FAQs

1. What does a product analyst do?

As product management professionals, product analysts are specialized in crunching data and monitoring usage patterns, making informed recommendations that lead to better products.

Product analysis is a discipline focused on creating valuable products by peering through data-driven insights.

The role involves suggesting product improvements at various points during the product life cycle and helping decision-makers to implement fundamental improvements to existing products.

Here are some of the core responsibilities you’ll be expected to bear as a product analyst:

Oversee product performance 

One of your primary responsibilities will be to ensure that the product functions as it was initially conceived.

Hence, you will have to identify critical trends and patterns related to product performance and correlate them with sales figures and customer feedback. You may have to use business intelligence software programs to gain access to product performance data, sales figures, etc. 

Understand what your customers want

Understanding how customers use a product is critical to improving it. Hence, as a product analyst, you’ll have to be prepared to interview customers, ask them to participate in surveys, and analyze the results to understand macro-level and granular insights about product performance.

In the process, you may use different research methods, such as focus groups, polling, and observation, to understand specific issues that customers may face. Knowing how to create survey forms and using tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) can be very useful. 

Tie data with product performance  

Once you’ve collected data, your job will require you to tie it with product performance.

It’s a critical step to assess if further improvements lead to competitive advantage, especially in existing competitors’ products. To do that, you’ll need to liaise with the IT department, product development team, and others to check if customer issues can be rectified. 

Get the message across to the right people 

You also need to explain key findings to senior management and other product managers to justify your suggestions. For this, you can use various charts, tables, and visuals to present data neatly to key decision-makers in the company. 

Here, you must do this only once you’ve understood what customers want. Knowing that is possible from their feedback and any survey results you obtain in the context of product performance as described in the previous step. 

2. Product analyst vs product manager vs business analyst: What’s the difference?

You may have come across these terms in various job advertisements and may have wondered how they’re different from each other. Product analysts, product managers, and business analysts have different roles and often work together and help each other to ensure the product achieves its market goals.

Let’s make their distinction simple for you in this table: 

3. What skills do you need to possess as a product analyst? 

If you plan to become a product analyst, there are some essential skills you’ll need to be prepared to acquire. Let’s look at each of them and understand why they are essential. 

Basic financial and marketing skills

Although you may not need domain-specific economic skills, you must still understand how the market works.

You should be able to understand demand and supply, conduct competition analysis, understand market trends, and use these skills to contextualize your product. These skills will help you make better decisions about adding or removing features to a particular product. 

Conduct research and write reports

Market research is an essential component of product analysis. Hence, you should be familiar with using popular market research tools such as Qualaroo, Ubersuggest by Neil Patel, SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, and others.

You should also have a working knowledge of using SPSS and other statistical tools to crunch data and the ability to translate those insights into coherent and relevant reports. Ensure you have access to NielsenIQ and Pew Research Center, and use the data within to contextualize your research reports. 

Data analysis skills

You should be able to work with large datasets comfortably and deserve insights. There are multiple tools to help you do that, ranging from customer relationship management (CRM) tools to other marketing tools.

Some of the techniques you need to know well are cohort analysis, A/B testing, heat mapping, funnel analysis, user survey, and session replay. Knowledge of these will help you to quantify observable consumer behavior while using products. Based on the insights you derive, you can then make robust recommendations. 

Technical and product management skills

A few necessary technical skills you’ll need are knowledge of programming languages like Structured Query Language (SQL) to extract information, NoSQL (non-relational or non-SQL) skills to work with unstructured data, using statistical tools like SPSS, along with other computer skills. 

You’ll also need product management skills to track and monitor a product across its lifecycle. This means you must be aware of designing a product, developing it, and distributing it. Being acquainted with Scrum methodology can be a great strength, especially in environments where software development is central. 

Interpersonal skills

As a product analyst, you’ll have to work with different departments and communicate consumer feedback in a manner that ultimately improves product features. Hence, you’ll need to have excellent communication and presentation skills to be able to work with various teams and individuals. 

This will help you find creative solutions and narrate them well to decision-makers. Other interpersonal skills you should have include being personable, motivated, and able to collaborate between teams and individuals. 

Now, let’s move over to take a look at how this profession can pay off.

4. What is the average product analyst’s salary?

Product analysts are well-paid. In the U.S., product analysts can expect an average salary of $84,625. This may go up to $95,318 for those with experience.

In the U.K., the average base pay for a product analyst is £51,925 per year, whereas in France, it’s €54,141. If you plan to work in Australia, you can expect to make AUD 103,302 on average per annum, whereas, in India, product analysts take home INR 1.1 million per year.

Now that you know the role, skills, and payoff, let’s discover how you can become a product analyst. 

5. How to become a product analyst

As long as you demonstrate a keen interest in understanding consumer needs and improving products to meet various demands, your doors to being a product analyst are open. Many product analyst roles do not have specific education requirements. However, you may need a bachelor’s degree in business, management, economics, mathematics, or another related field. 

As the role is where product management and data analytics meet, a common way of preparing for the role these days is via bootcamps and learning programs. Have a look at your existing transferable skills and background first, to see which area you need more training in.

Do you have an education in mathematics and some experience in data, but feel like the product side is where you need to improve? Then consider a product management program to fill out that skillset and build product analyst experience.

Maybe you’ve found yourself working in product in the past as a product manager, owner, or a project manager, and need to work on your knowledge of working with data? In that case it’s worthwhile to look into a data analytics course to get a solid grasp of what’s required.

Additionally, you’ll need to gain experience in areas like business analysis, systems analysis, or similar roles. Knowledge in product and user analysis, feature flagging and testing, product development, project management, and effective communication are usually recommended to secure a decent take-home package.

6. Final thoughts

Product analysts are in great demand across industry verticals and are well paid professionals. This renders becoming a product analyst a promising and fulfilling career choice. Though not a very technical-oriented role, it does require you to have impressive analytical skills. 

So, you’ll have to be prepared to use various tools to track product performance, interview, survey consumers, and convincingly present your findings to improve product performance. As you learn to do this well, you can surely expect fulfilment, career advancement, and growth.

If you like the resources we discussed here, or are interested in product roles in general, CareerFoundry’s free product management short course should help you get started on your awareness about building and launching products. If you think it’s the analyst area you need more experience in, then ease yourself into it with our 5-day data analytics short course.

If you’d like to read more on the subject of product management instead, check out these articles:

• What is a Technical Product Manager?
• What Is the Product Management Process? The 7 Stages Explained
• What Does a Chief Product Officer Do? A Beginner’s Guide

7. Product analyst FAQs

Is product analyst a technical role?

Yes, partly. Although you will be required to crunch data and figures and use SQL and NoSQL to do that, you will also need strong interpersonal and market research skills. Hence, the role is holistic, requiring multiple skills we’ve listed above. 

Is a data analyst the same as a product analyst?

No. A data analyst analyzes all kinds of data that may be unrelated to the product. On the other hand, a product analyst tracks and monitors all types of product data, from design to delivery and continues to conduct market research, etc., to understand consumer needs. Although both work with data, their roles are vastly different. 

Does a product analyst do coding?

Not really. Product analysts use various data collection tools and process data to derive consumer and product performance insights. They use their communication and presentation skills to help product managers and developers to understand the market gap the product faces.

Browsing job ads can quite quickly reveal the classic conundrum: you need to have experience as a product manager in order to become one. But it might definitely help to remember this: a “junior” in product management is not someone looking for their first experience in product. 

You can skip ahead to a section by using the clickable menu:

1. What is an entry-level product manager?
2. What does an entry-level product manager do?
3. Types of entry-level product manager jobs
4. Junior product manager skills
5. How much do junior product managers earn?
6. How to become an entry-level product manager
7. Wrap-up

1. What is an entry-level product manager?

An entry-level or junior product manager typically has at least one year of full-time work experience. 

The absolute newbies, when it comes to product, are called associate product managers, or APMs. These are people who may or may not have had other previous professional experience, but have started their journey in product. It’s these who are the real entry-levels. Which brings us to the new question: what are their days like? 

2. What does an entry-level product manager do?

So, what does an entry-level product manager actually do in their day-to-day life? 

Tactical tasks

In a majority of cases, the less experience you have in product management, the higher the probability of finding yourself involved in more tactical tasks.

What does this mean? It means that at the beginning of your journey into product management, the scope of action and the level of responsibility you’re assigned will likely be restricted. 

Working on existing product lines

You’re more likely to be asked to work on an existing product line, as opposed to launching a brand new one from scratch.

You’ll more than likely be spending time shadowing other PMs—spending time watching how they work across different tasks. After a while, it will be your turn to take the driver’s seat and for them to shadow you, and provide advice if needed. 

Input into product strategy

While the chance to make a positive contribution towards the strategy of a product should always be present, it’s unlikely that a junior product manager would be solely responsible for developing and crafting an entire product strategy. 

3. Types of entry-level product manager jobs

We can split entry-level product manager jobs into two basic fields: generalist and specialist roles. Examples of the latter would include titles such as “junior technical PM” or “junior data PM”. Why not take our product management career quiz to figure out which role might fit you best?

Specialist entry-level product management jobs

The job titles above indicate that that particular job function requires specific skills in a given discipline in addition to generalist product management skills.

To take an example from the non-tech world, it’s similar to saying: “We are hiring a cook”, or “We are hiring a pizzaiolo”. In both cases, some cooking of foodstuffs will be required. 

A word of warning on specializing early

It’s useful to bear in mind a few things about this distinction: while specialist entry-level product management roles might provide a smoother transition into the field, they might also be perceived as a constraint for future roles along the product manager career path. 

Let’s take the example of a former developer that decided to transition into product management: they might find their technical background gives them an edge over less tech-savvy candidates. They might also find it harder to convince hiring managers about their competence in design or business. 

This is not necessarily an issue if that product manager is keen to embark on an individual contributor track, but it may hinder their progress if they have medium and long-term ambitions to move into a Chief Product Officer or VP of Product role, with line management responsibility. 

So it’s something to keep on the back of one’s mind, even while trying to get a foot on the first step of the PM career. For more detailed information about the different career development options open to PMs, check out Brent Tworetzky’s product manager skills article.

4. Junior product manager skills

So what would be the typical things you can expect to be doing as a junior product manager? 

Well, a lot of the ground work will involve learning: learning about the product, learning about the different teams in the company and how they work together. Learning about the tools and processes, as well as understanding the metrics (OKRs, KPIs) behind decision-making. 

Important note: A word of caution should be added about taking a junior PM role that turns out to be a job for an agile delivery manager, a scrum product owner, or a project manager. It’s unfortunately a sad reality that many companies still don’t understand the difference between these three. 

For entry-level roles, in particular, it’s not uncommon to see job descriptions listing competencies such as “able to follow through on projects and stick to budgets and agreed timelines”. To quote Marty Cagan, that scope of competencies equals roughly 5% of what an actual PM is meant to be doing. 

Ravi Mehta has written at length about how product managers will be focusing on developing different skills as their career progresses. His product competency toolkit is considered a good self-assessment tool for PMs to both understand their strong points, and what they might need to work on next. The three most prominent entry-level product manager skills are: 

• feature specification 
• product quality assurance
• business outcome ownership

5. How much do junior product managers earn?

Now that we’ve seen what tasks and skills are expected of them, let’s check out how much entry-level product managers earn.

At the moment as 2024 is about to begin, the average junior product manager salary in the United States is $100K, according to job site Glassdoor. Unsurprisingly, this figure varies around the world. With that in mind, here are the salary ranges you might expect in different countries (yearly gross salaries in local currency): 

• Australia (AUS $73–133,000)
• Canada (CA $62–90,000) 
• France (€38–48,000) 
• Germany (€45–58,000) 
• India: ₹476–973,000
• Italy (€24–45,000) 
• Spain (€20–52,000) 
• United Kingdom (£26–48,000)
• United States ($76–133,000) 

Some other platforms you can also take into account while doing your salary research are Otta (U.K.-focused) or Landing.jobs (Europe-focused), as well as the recently-launched salary comparison platform Comprehensive.io. 

How to negotiate a junior product manager salary

Let’s talk about money. First off, location has a direct impact on the average compensation a junior PM can expect to be offered. 

Secondly, not all tech organizations use the same pay scale: If your grandparents have heard of the company you want to work for, chances are the average pay there will be more attractive than what you might expect at an unknown startup. 

Bear the following factors in mind when selecting the companies where you might want to land your first product manager role: 

• Location
• Industry
• Company size
• Company maturity (pre-seed, seed, startup, scale-up, pre-IPO, post-IPO)
• Product-culture maturity (does the company confuse between project/product, do they explicitly position themselves as product-led, or are they in between?)

Then comes the next set of factors that reveal what your leverage might be as a candidate:

• Can you demonstrate particularly hard-to-source, hard-to-find skills? 
• Do you have previous demonstrable working experience in the industry, even if not as a product manager?
• Does your educational background work for you or against you? (it’s more than just formal education, think also about possible certifications you might have taken in the past). 

All of this combined will hopefully result in an offer being extended to you. 

6. How to become an entry-level product manager

This article began by outlining the chicken and the egg problem in product management: what comes first—the experience, or the job? What about on-the-job training? 

While finding an Associate Product Manager program would be the preferred, systemized entry gate for many, the fact of the matter is that there are far fewer programs than candidates. 

The second best option might be transitioning into product within your current employer (assuming a product department is in place), which would still require some leveling up on your end. That is where self-learning comes into play. 

From the moment when you’ve decided that product management will be your next step, choosing a product management course which blends theory and practice and includes coaching with people who work in the industry, can go a long way in kick-starting your career.

If you’re already working in tech, the right course can focus on how to develop the missing skills in your product manager resume; if you’re working in a completely different world, working with a mentor or coach can accelerate the process of acquiring a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary (tech does have quite a bit of jargon, after all!).

Finally, there is the increasingly important concept of proof of work: displaying your assets, preferably in an applied way, with easy to understand examples. Basically, having a portfolio that both gets you interviews and helps you navigate them. 

If you want to learn step-by-step, check out our complete guide to how to become a product manager.

7. Wrap-up

There’s no one right way to get into entry-level product management. There are, however, quite a few things that can ease the transition into one of the most coveted, hardest-to-define professions out there: reading Marty Cagan, doing some ground research on the actual skills the market is looking for, and constant leveling up.

So, are you ready to start your career in product management? Excellent! Get a hands-on introduction to the profession with our free product management short course. Covering everything from strategy and design to the Agile methodology, the course will give you the tools and understanding you need to start your career in this field.

Still undecided? Here are a couple of articles to help you take the final step forward:

• Why product management could be a great career choice for you
• The difference between a technical PM and a “regular” PM
  
• What are the career paths open to PMs