Manage business contacts for Product Management

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What if I told you that there was a booming six figure job being hired for in tech companies right now that doesn't require any coding knowledge or skills. Stick around to learn more about product management, what tasks you'll do and what skills you might need. Also, as a bonus, we'll have a look at some real world product manager job ads to help you understand what companies are looking for when they hire for this role. Hey there, I'm Zoe. Senior Product Owner here at CareerFoundry. In the past I've worked in different product management and different product roles. So today in this video I'm gonna be talking to you a little bit about what the different responsibilities and tasks are for product managers. Product management offers a fast pace, varied and highly rewarding career path. It's also a great time to be looking into product management because so many companies are hiring for this position now to give you some real life. Of how to get started. We've picked out three different product manager job ads, so you can get a clear idea of what skills you might need and what to expect when applying to similar roles in the future. Before we dive into the job ads and responsibilities, first let's cover what exactly is product management. In a business, the product managers are the ones who are responsible for overseeing the entire lifecycle of a product, a service, or a technology. It can be just a single person or an entire team. They all have one main mission, which is to guide the planning, development, and launch of a product. They also continue to manage the product once it's on the market. Product management is a strategic role that involves multiple functions like user experience. And technology. It involves focusing on the intersection of what end users need and what goals the business has in order to develop a strategy and a vision for the product. Ideally, product managers look for solutions and ideas that satisfy both things. So as you can see, product managers work in a variety of different disciplines, which makes it an exciting, fast paced and really varied field to be a part of. So with all those different elements as a part of the role, you'll often. Product managers say that there's no typical day on the job, but there are some common skills that product managers use regardless of the company or the product that they're working on. One of the first ones is understanding user needs. This is one of the key skills for product managers having a deep understanding for the users of your products, so who they are. What they need, what their pain points are is really at the heart of what a product manager does. You'll often hear this referred to as having empathy for the user. Whatever decisions you or your team take, the user needs are what you should always fall back on. Product managers are responsible for advocating for the needs of the users to the business. And keeping them in mind with any solutions or new technologies or features that you build. A second skill that product managers are responsible for is managing the product lifecycle. Product managers are in charge of the overall process of how does technology or software actually get built. So going back to the first point, first product managers will start with what the user needs are, and the business goals are to identify the main problems to be solved. Then product managers will work together with their teams to come up with possible solutions and new ideas, and then product managers will experiment or test to see which solutions are. And might have really high impact for the users. And lastly, it's important to note that product managers don't do any of this work alone. So another key responsibility is getting together different teams throughout this product lifecycle. So thinking back to product management, working at the intersection of user experience. Business and technology product managers are responsible for making sure each one of these groups are working together throughout the product life cycle and understand where a product or new idea is in this cycle as well. This can look like clearly updating the each of these groups on new releases or new developments coming from the tech. And this can also involve updating everyone on the team's progress toward its goals. So communication is really the key skill that ties all three of these together, and is the bridge between the management of the product lifecycle and understanding the user needs. If you'd like to know more about the product lifecycle and what that actually looks like, Let us know in the comments below. Since product is at the intersection of user experience, business and technology, different product manager jobs will lean more heavily on each of those skills. This framework can help you think about which aspect interests you the most, what fits your skillset, or what direction you might wanna grow your career. One of the best ways to get an understanding of what a product manager does is to take a look at real company job ads. You can see what hiring managers typically expect from a product manager and also get a better understanding how the role can vary from company to company. So as promised now we're gonna get into the second part of the video where we go through some of these real life job ads for product managers. First up, we've got an entry level internship and the title for this role. Associate product manager, so this is something you'll see in product management. Job adds a lot. The more entry or mid-level roles will be named Associate Product Manager, or product Associate is a super common title you might see and a good thing to look for if you're just starting out in your career. This first job ad is for an associate product manager role at HubSpot. Which could be a really good fit for somebody with a background in marketing or sales or customer service. We see right away they're highlighting the skill that we talked about around understanding the users really deeply and having empathy for their needs. They're also focused on collaboration and problem solving, which lines up with what we'd expect as well. In this role, it looks like you'd be building the product vision driven by different inputs from the business, the customers, data, and the market. This is really highlighting those interdisciplinary aspects of product management where you're taking in a lot of. And then making a decision and ultimately driving the direction for the product. Something I also see in the second line here is that they highlight the mentorship aspect of this role, so this could be a great thing to look for. Again, if you're starting out in your career or just looking to get into product management. They also highlight here, working with cross-functional stakeholders, engineers, and designers, working on cross-functional teams is something that also comes up over and over again in product management job. So another thing they highlight here is that you'll be measuring the product use and adoption. This goes back to the skill we talked about before where product managers are responsible for the product even after it's launched and on the market. They mention a desire to deeply understand the users. Listen effectively to others and collaborate with others across different teams. So again, this is coming back to that core skill of communication, which is really important across all product management roles. This is something they really highlight as some of the more soft skills that you could come into with the job Already. Even in this internship and entry level product management role, we can see they're really highlighting the core skills we talked about from understanding the user. To communicating effectively across different teams, working with different parts of the business, and really being responsible for the product lifecycle as a whole. So moving on, the next role we're gonna look at is for an associate product manager role. This one is not an internship and maybe even a little bit more of a mid-level role. So this is a product role at TripAdvisor, which is a travel booking platform. You're looking to drive a great user experience for hotel and restaurant owners. This is a role from what I can see so far that's gonna lean really heavily on the user experience aspect We see right away, which we saw in the last job ad that you'll be working on a cross-functional team. They highlight already. That you'll be focused on all stages of the product lifecycle, and they highlight again, one more time, that the focus is on creating a best in class experience for hotel and restaurant owners. They also highlight the users again and some of the different needs they might have. It's right here. They say you're looking to optimize the way that users purchase paid products and manage their own subscription. In the third bullet here, they highlight working with senior product managers. So again, this could be something that indicates their opportunities for mentorship. In this role, they mentioned again, you'll be working together on cross-functional teams. So the cross-functional team will likely be the day-to-day group of people that you're working with, and by saying project manager, they probably are interested in emphasizing the delivery aspect of the product lifecycle. So getting things launched, getting them to market. Lastly, they also mentioned here, defining and tracking the. Metric for products, which is where the more analytical aspects of product management might come in. So one thing they highlight in the skills section is potentially having skills in the accounting or finance space. So if you're an applicant who has some industry knowledge here, that could be helpful. This is one place where skills might be transferrable from other jobs or work you've done. They also specifically call out written communication skills, writing product requirements, and status update. A second time here, they highlight the project management skills. Some roles will be focused a little more on discovering which problems to solve and a little more crafting open-ended solutions. Whereas other roles and especially more junior roles might be a little more focused on delivering solutions or launching ideas that might be already a little bit more defined. So because they mentioned project management twice in this job ad, I think that. This could be a little bit more of the latter, which can be a really great place to get started as a new product manager and eventually take on more responsibility and discovery aspects of the role later on in your career. This is listed as a more mid-level product management role, but they don't specify any. Specific required years of experience. So even if you're early on in your career, this could totally still be worth applying to or reaching out to the hiring manager and talking a little bit about the job, I see a lot of opportunities. That could be great for someone also early on in their career. Then lastly, we're gonna look at one more project manager job ad for a role at Uber. It's a role that has a little bit more than the other two of a technical focus. So if you're coming in with some technical background or skills, this might be a good fit for you. So getting right into the job ad, we can see that this is a product manager role. Specifically for the checkout platform. So they've already got a really specific product in mind and potentially already a set of problems that they're looking to solve. They highlight what they're looking for out of the product vision, so this is a seamless. Payment experience. The users are all earners and spenders across Uber products globally, so we've got a strong product vision to start off with. And a set of users that you'd be thinking about in this role. They mentioned here that you will deeply understand Uber's mission and strategies. They're highlighting the business goals, so having a really good business sense, maybe a background in. Then they're also looking for you to create a vision and strategy for the team. In this way, they're looking for somebody who can have a big picture of where a certain product is headed and also do really great storytelling to get other people excited about that product vision. Once again, we are three for three, seeing that you will drive a cross-functional team. So then at the end they highlight communicating throughout their product life cycle. Understanding data and being analytical, and then again, working closely together with team members from different departments or different backgrounds. So they're also looking for experience delivering successful products. So this is that last stage of the product lifecycle actually launching things, getting them live to users. They also highlight having deep customer empathy, so being able to keep the user needs at top of mind throughout the whole process. Then a last interesting thing about this role is they do specifically highlight having technical skills. So they want you to be able to converse with the. Understand what decisions the engineering team is making and basically have a general technical understanding. This doesn't necessarily need to be super deep. You don't have to have a coding background yourself, but they're looking for the ability to understand, or at least learn how engineering teams work. So as we can see from this job description, it's more of a mid-level role, and yet it's at a larger corporation. You might need to come in with a little. Experience, whether in product management or from related fields. In a role like this, you might also have a bit larger of a scope or a bit wider of an audience that you're communicating your product decisions to. A quick note, if you're enjoying this video, please take a second to like and subscribe to CareerFoundry YouTube channel. We've got a lot more product management content planned for the upcoming. So stay tuned, and that's it. Hopefully now that you've seen me look through some real world product management job ads, it'll give you an idea of how to approach the job search process and also some things to look out for for roles that you might apply for in the future. Also, be sure to let us know in the comments if you'd like any more details or practical tutorials on any of the skills we've mentioned in this video. And if after watching this video, product management sounds like something that might be right for you, CareerFoundry also has a free short course on product management. The link for the short course is in the description below. It'll get you started in this exciting field and also give you a more specific idea of what your tasks would be. Well, that's it. I hope you enjoyed this video and that it was helpful. Be sure to subscribe for more product management videos in the coming weeks. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.