Have you ever noticed how every other person not in Product but within a customer impacting role wants to break into Product Management somehow? Your support analysts, QAs, engineers, business consultants, implementers, the co-op kid just in for 3 months – you name it! It makes for a pretty coveted career path.
And then there’s the rest of the world. Almost oblivious to what we, as Product professionals, do. To a lot of them, we’re Project Managers. It’s like when I tell the authorities my full name and then my husband’s full name. Yes, Fawad is my husband’s first name actually – can we please get past that now?!
Let me summarize the basic statistics for Product people:
- Majority are in their mid 30s to early 40s
- Typically have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree
- 41,000+ Product Managers in the US alone
- Approximately 70% male and 30% female Product Managers globally
According to PMExercises, a top-performing Product Manager can help increase company profits by more than 34%. So the real question becomes: What skill-set helps enable this increase in profits?
Product Managers need to be the jack of all trades. We need to understand and influence every part of the customer journey – every.single.part. From unboxing to interacting to returning to the product for more – every.single.part. And as Sun Tzu famously said, “Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer.” – never forget to study your competition.
It’s no wonder then that 80% of Product Managers are involved in both design and go-to-market activities. If you’re wondering what their typical week looks like, below is a great split:
Notice how in almost everything they do there’s an element of soft skills? They essentially need to be strong headed, empathetic, resilient, smooth talkers! They need to be the living example of LinkedIn’s 11 top most in-demand soft skills for 2022:
- The sense of efficiency
- Organizational skills
- Communication skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Social intelligence
- Versatility
- Flexibility
- Team spirit
- Solidarity with others
- Sense of initiative
- Creativity
With Product careers being so critical to a business, there’s been a positive impact on the associated career ladder. For half of my career, I’ve had a dotted line to the CTO because CPO (Chief Product Officer) was never really a thing. Today, 15% of the Fortune 5000 have a CPO in their C-suite. That means a more promising ladder to climb for us Product people.
The point being, we’re all seeing the mass exodus happening from Silicon Valley. When Product people leave, they take with them their belongings, their mind-set and frameworks that have helped them succeed thus far. We’ll continue seeing the proliferation of the Product mind-set and growth globally.
If you have the privilege of managing teams, give retention bonuses just as much thought as sign-on bonuses because if your strong product people leave, your loss will be bigger than theirs.
If you have the privilege of already being in a Product career, don’t settle!
If you are an aspiring Product professional, this is the right time to be in the market. LinkedIn’s 2022 list of jobs on the rise, both for Canada and U.S, includes Product.
Here’s to a prosperous 2023.
Remember Allah in prosperity, and He will remember you in adversity.
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)