Why Should You Consider Product Management as a Career Option?
Product management is one of the quickest-growing fields in the technology sector. Product managers play a vital role in innovative advancements by helping implement technology and strategy for the creation of products and software.
Product managers are said to help companies increase their profits by 34.2%. This increases the demand for skilled product managers who can help businesses grow unparalleled.
Besides being a high-paying career path, product management is projected to grow at 32%, becoming a secure job. Read on to find out why you should consider product management as a career option and how a product management certification program can help you.
What Is Product Management?
Product management is an integral part of a product development process. It refers to applying tools and techniques that help optimise and successfully execute the product life cycle. As a product manager, individuals are tasked with integrating data, people, business systems, and processes for smooth operation.
Moreover, product management as a discipline helps ensure that the product requirements of both the business and the end users are met. Therefore, by developing the product’s roadmap and strategy, product managers help grow the business and brand image.
It is also important to understand that product management, due to its wide responsibility, is not an isolated domain. For successful product management, individuals need to implement inputs from different fields and ensure collaboration, resulting in a high-quality, usable product.
Product Management Vs Project Management
It is common to see the terms product management and project management being used interchangeably. However, it is vital to understand that product and project managers have distinctive roles.
While product management involves setting a roadmap and vision and creating a strategic plan for a product, project management refers to planning project timelines, breaking down initiatives into tasks, and assigning them to different teams.
Therefore, while product managers help drive product development, project managers oversee the execution of development plans.
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Product Manager Roles And Responsibilities
A product manager’s roles and responsibilities vary with industries, businesses, and product lines. Due to the nature of their job, product managers need to handle various tasks. However, their primary function is introducing, developing, and marketing a successful product.
A common product management job description contains the following responsibilities:
- Developing strategies and tasks to make the product successful
- Performing market analysis and research to understand market trends and demands
- Competitive analysis, including SWOT analysis
- Developing product development life cycle according to resource availability and feasibility
- Marketing of the product in coordination with the sales objective
- Creating product roadmaps and ensuring follow-through by different teams
- Establishing communication between developers, stakeholders, and clients.
- Ideating, innovating, and conceptualising products that align with the company’s vision and market demands
- Creating documentation of all forms for the product
- Understanding and implementing the latest product management tools and technologies during the product life cycle
Why Choose Product Management As A Career?
Product management is on the rise among different sectors. Offering lucrative salaries across industries, the average salary of a product manager is around Rs. 17 LPA, which increases with expertise and specialised technical domains.
Apart from being a high-paying job, product management is in high demand across sectors, including IT, service, and business. Offering a promising career with growth, here’s why you should choose product management as a career:
1. Valuable To A Business
By helping optimise a product life cycle, a product manager can help increase business profits significantly. This adds value to the business, which eventually results in financial and personal rewards.
2. Competitive Salary
As mentioned above, product management is a high-paying career field. Moreover, it offers growth and job security since the demand for product managers is on the rise.
3. Flexibility
Since sectors across industries are adopting product management, you can take up the role of a product manager in a sector of your choice. Moreover, most roles of a product manager come with the option of remote working.
4. Easy Training
Switching to product management is easy as there are various product management courses in India that you can take online, regardless of your background. You can undergo a product management certification program, which will boost your career.
5. Learn And Grow
Since product management has a large working scope, it also offers multiple chances to learn new skills as you work with cross-functional teams. This enables you to acquire skills from different domains and instils skills like problem-solving, communication, and management, which are highly useful.
If you are interested in business and technology and want a mix of both, product management is the ideal career for you. Moreover, it is suitable for someone who enjoys problem-solving and wants to help shape the future of a business.
Product Management Skills And Prerequisites
Product management encompasses a wide scope of work and, therefore, requires soft skills, experience, and basic knowledge of different domains involved in the product life cycle. In addition, you must learn to use different product management tools to help optimise the process.
Product Management Skills
To become a product manager, you must have the following skills:
- Research skills
- Technical skills
- Business acumen
- Innovation
- Communication
- Critical thinking
- Problem-solving
- Leadership
- Strategic thinking
- Collaboration
- Attention to detail
- Prioritisation
Product management Prerequisites
Product management is flexible, allowing people to switch careers without a background in a particular field. However, besides having the skills mentioned above, you must meet the following criteria to become a product manager:
- Graduation and master’s degree, preferably in a business-related discipline
- Work experience, depending on the role
- Agile methodology training
- Business analysis and data analysis knowledge
You can gain the required qualities and skills through a product management course, which involves hands-on training to give you the necessary experience. These courses also offer the necessary skill set required to perform analysis and create an optimised product lifecycle.
Final Words
Product management is a lucrative career field that finds applications across industries. Moreover, having the responsibility to create and maintain a product life cycle, product management offers individuals the chance to collaborate and interact with different teams.
A career in product management comes with growth, security, and high salaries. Therefore, if you are someone with the ability to lead different groups, establish collaboration, collect and analyse data, and want to add value to products, entering the management field as a product manager is the ideal career choice for you.
