Demand, role, salary Product Manager job

What is it like working as a Product Manager? What is a Product Manager's role, position in a company, salary and daily life? In the following section, Wild Code School offers you a general overview of what it means to work as a Product Manager in the digital sector.

The market demand

For the past 5 years, this job has become increasingly essential in European tech companies (it has existed for longer in the US) and the need for them is only growing.

Indeed, Product Managers combine diverse and almost incompatible skills - which turn them into THE profiles in high demand on the employment market. Whether it is in startups or in big companies, this hybrid profile is being hard to find.

Product Manager job

Product managers are often considered as CEOs of a product. Like conductors, they are responsible for almost all the steps involved in creating a product (usually a tech product):

• defining the vision of the product 
• doing impact analysis, writing a business plan 
• defining the roadmap (weekly and long term roadmaps) and prioritise developments 
• carrying out field surveys 
• designing the features (or "the specs") 
• working with designers to create mocks, prototypes 
• writing more or less technical specs 
• coordinating teams (sprint planning), assigning tasks and validating features 
• managing bug reports (the quality part) 
• in charge of the internal communication of the product and training programmes (making sure everyone in the company knows the product) 
• in charge of the external communication

Hence, they have to master the 3 main parts of their jobs: the business part, the tech part, and the marketing part.

However, we can surely underline that it is important not to be mistaken between a Product Manager and a Project Manager. This last one’s missions rely on the organization in order to achieve a goal by managing a team. On the contrary, the Product Manager is in direct contact with the CEO, and works closely with UX designers, engineers, data scientists, business analysts as well as with users and sales teams.

We could say that 3 years of experience are needed to become a fully operational Product Manager.

Average salary of Product Manager

In European countries, the salary goes from 37 K to 69 K on average. It depends on the experiences, but also on the country where the Product Manager is working.

Do you speak Product Manager? Terms to know

• Agile methods: set of practices to carry out projects
• Sprint planning: in an agile method, a sprint is a period of time during which a specific task must be completed before it can be reviewed
• Roadmap: past and future developments of a product or service with a strong technological component