Analysing Career Paths for Top Talent | Product Management

Today marks the beginning of a series in which we will dive deeper into some of the most common career paths within Nova.

Nova

Ramón Rodrigáñez

, and

Andrea Marino

Apr 18, 2024

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

Summary:

Careers in Product Management. In this issue, we dive deep into the world of Product Management, a role that has become indispensable in our tech-driven era. If you have ever wondered what exactly a Product Manager does, how to become one, what are the salaries, or how to find and retain exceptional PMs, you will love this issue.
Product Event. On April 25th we host a very cool event in Madrid with our friends from ISDI and Shakers. Read through to apply for an invite (by application only as we are receiving tons of interest).

Part 1: Careers in Product Management

Today marks the beginning of a series in which we will dive deeper into some of the most common career paths within Nova. Our purpose with this series is twofold:

For Novas and candidates in general, our goal is to give visibility into the most demanded careers: from salaries and career paths to the advantages, disadvantages, and tradeoffs they all have and the insights on how to break into those careers.
For Founders, Managers, and HR Professionals, our purpose is to give you insights into how to attract, hire, and retain the most sought-after professionals.

We will start today with one of the most demanded roles which is becoming very trendy within Nova: Product Managers.

1. What is a Product Manager?

This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer, as it is a relatively recent role that changes responsibilities and profiles across industries and companies. For the sake of this newsletter, we will restrict the concept of Product Managers to those working in tech companies and building digital products, but there are PMs as well in fashion or FMCG who work in relatively similar roles.

The term ‘Product Manager” or “PM” began popping up alongside the rise of more complex digital products that required careful orchestration across their lifecycles in the 1980s.

Fast forward to today, the classical definition is the role that sits at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience, requiring a blend of skills in each of these domains and often described with the Venn diagram below.

However, we prefer a slightly different definition. Tech companies make typically their biggest investments in developing technology through internal or external engineering and design teams. If you think about it, the end goal of a Product Manager should be to maximize the return on those investments.

That is why our favorite definition of a Product Manager is “the person in charge of maximizing the ROI of a company’s investment in technology development”.

In order to maximize this ROI in technology, Product Managers need to ensure the Engineering and Design teams work on the right problems, not just any problem. Thus, the core responsibility of a Product Manager is to identify, define, and quantify the market opportunities or “problems” that users have, so that the company can drive the development of products to address them. The key role of the PM is not to actually “solve” problems, as this is a shared responsibility with Engineering and Design, but to find those problems worth solving by the most expensive teams in a company.

In order to do this, PMs gather and prioritize customer requirements, define the product vision, and work closely with Engineering, Design, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support to ensure the products are properly released so that the company accomplishes its goals. Their job also includes managing the product lifecycle from concept to phasing out of the product, making decisions about functionality, design, and features, both those to be created and those to be removed.

Great Product Managers are tough to find and are highly demanded in the market because they possess a very complex combination of skills, including at least 5:

Outstanding understanding of the market and the business, its drivers, and its main KPIs (ideally close to the one of the CEO of the company).
Good understanding of technology and design, so they can work with Design and Engineering teams and drive the development of solutions that are feasible within the constraints of the company.
Excellent communication, influence, and stakeholder management skills, as they must be great at listening to customer feedback, and conveying their vision to stakeholders at all levels, driving alignment and execution across teams.
Great ability to prioritize tasks and features, balancing constraints and opportunities, and great project management skills.
Strong analytical skills to assess the needs, the user behaviors, the market, and the competition to define a clear, actionable product strategy.

Ultimately, a Product Manager is a professional who strives to deliver solutions that customers love, that fit the market needs, and that align with the business objectives.

2. The Product Management Career Path

Because Product is a relatively “new” role, there is still no industry-wide standard of how careers in Product should look like. Having said that, most companies would structure their career paths into 4 big types of roles:

Associate Product Manager: the most junior role, here is where new joiners in the role learn the basics by supporting more seasoned PMs. In these roles, you are typically involved in managing smaller features or products and gathering user feedback and you work closely with cross-functional teams to deliver product improvements.
Product Manager: once you have some experience in the role, you jump to the main “individual contributor” role where you manage specific products or features, overseeing everything from ideation to launch and you gather feedback for improvements.
Senior Product Manager: With greater experience comes greater responsibility. Senior PMs often manage multiple product lines and help shape strategic decisions. This role demands a deep understanding of the product’s market, competitive positioning, and customer base. They are expected to innovate and drive growth by developing compelling product strategies.
Head of Product / VP Product / Chief Product Officer: At the top of the pyramid, roles become less about the details and more about steering the product ship towards long-term goals, ensuring the product aligns with business objectives, and mentoring the next generation of PMs. This is one of the most strategic roles in technology companies.

Some companies have done a great job of defining the skills and responsibilities of the different stages in the Product career path, as well as the salaries. For instance, Cabify, the Spanish unicorn, has this one published on their website.

3. How to break into Product Management

One of the few “drawbacks” of Product careers is that is typically quite hard to break into Product Management. If you browse Nova, LinkedIn, or any job board out there, you won’t find many entry-level roles looking for people without experience.

The career path for a Product Manager typically starts with another type of role, typically a foundational role in business, data technology, or design.

Many Product Managers begin their careers in positions such as Business Analyst, Software Developer, or Marketing Specialist, where they gain valuable insights into an industry or a market, and then jump to the product team to solve a problem they are familiar with.

To break into Product Management there is no “secret formula”, but typically you want to:

Learn the basics of Product Management (the “horizontal skills”, valuable for any product role in all industries). Product School, Reforge, or Nova offer great programs, but there are tons of free online content you can utilize, including YouTube videos, podcasts, and books.
Gain some deep expertise (the “vertical skills”) in something that can be useful for a product manager: this can be either market/business understanding in a given industry (for instance “fintech”), or technical skills (for instance great coding or data skills).
Work on side projects where you actually find problems and solve them with some kind of digital solution. If you do not know how to code, ChatGPT or no-code tools make building software products today accessible to anybody.

If you are passionate about Product Management and you do the 3 above, you will end up breaking into the industry, sooner or later. In many cases, that first role will happen as a side move in a company where you already have lots of context and expertise rather than applying to a new role in a new company.

4. Show Me the Money: Salaries in Product Management

Let’s talk numbers because, let’s be honest, we all like a good paycheck at the end of the day and salary is one of the most important factors when choosing careers.

Salaries in Product Management can vary widely between startups and more consolidated companies. Of course, there are big differences by market and we cannot summarize them all here, but here are some of the stats of the 2023 Top Talent Report in Spain, Italy, and Sweden, which include as well salaries reported by Novas and available in our benchmark tool in platform:

Salary Benchmark from 2023 — Salaries reported by Novas

5. What do Product Managers look for in their Ideal Job?

When PMs look for their ideal job, they are not just looking for a good salary (which is very important for them). They typically crave challenging work, attractive product/service to work on, meritocracy, and good work-life balance.

In our latest Top Talent Report, we found that their ideal job had the following characteristics:

In terms of company traits, attractive products and services (which is not typically the most attractive trait in other roles)
In terms of work environment value almost equally work-life balance, meritocracy, leaders who support self-improvement and creativity, and dynamism.
In terms of role characteristics, product managers look for challenging work
Finally, in terms of compensation, competitive fixed salaries are the most relevant aspect of the ideal job for Product Managers.

Here you have more details on what Product Managers at Nova value in their ideal role.

6. Hiring the Best PMs: Job Description and Selection Process

6.1 Job Descriptions in Product Management

In order to attract great product managers, you should start with a great job description that paints a clear picture of what the role entails and what makes your company an exciting place to work. In order to nail a PM job description, you should include:

Present your product in an engaging and clear way, presenting your competitive advantages how you position yourself in the market and what is your vision for the future.
Describe the org chart, how the team works, and what are the key dynamics. Great Product Managers want to know whether the Engineering team is internal or external, what is the methodology of working (Scrum, Kanban, etc.), and what level of responsibility and autonomy they have.
Detail any specific requirements for the role, such as no-code or any technical skills.
Finally, dare to share the salary range and any benefits or extras you may offer.

6.2 Interview Processes in Product Management

Once you have the right candidates in the process, you should design a selection process that is able to spot the core skills you want in a great PM: stakeholder management, communication skills, analytical skills, project management, understanding of technology and user experience (UX) and understanding of the market and the competition. This interview process typically has 2 types of interviews:

1-3 personal interviews where, through background, behavioral, and situational questions, you try to assess the cultural fit and the “soft skills” of the candidate, such as stakeholder management or communication skills.
1 technical interview after a task-home, where you assess the more technical skills such as UX, analytical skills, or the understanding of the market and competition. The best technical interview for PMs typically involves 4 parts:
- Problem setting: explain a problem or opportunity you have identified
- Research and analysis: ask the candidate to investigate briefly the problem through some kind of market or customer research to understand and quantify the problem
- Idea generation and documentation: ask the candidates to generate solutions and generate solutions and document them like they would do when working with Engineering or Design teams, for instance with user stories.
- Prototype / MVP / Design: in case you need a PM with technical capacities such as no-code, ask them to build a small prototype of the solution. This could also be a Figma design of the solution.

7. Career tradeoffs: what are the Pros and Cons of Product Management

By now you should hopefully have a great idea about what Product Management is, what careers look like, how to break into Product, and how to hire the best PMs with the right salaries and job traits.

However, we do not believe careers in Products are better or worse than others. Careers are never good or bad in general, but to each of us depending on our background, skills, and preferences. In this sense, as with all careers, there are tradeoffs in Product Management.

Some of the most important advantages are:

Very good salaries, higher than most roles apart from some Sales, Engineering, and Professional Services
Very good work-life balance, typically much better than in Professional Services and close to those in Engineering
Very interesting and impactful role
Great career exits: PMs make great CEOs, founders, consultants, etc.

The main drawbacks are:

As we saw, it is tough to “break into” Product Management and there is no easy way to start
In big companies, junior and mid-level product roles have sometimes little impact and autonomy, as they end up passing information between teams with no real impact in building things or making strategic decisions

Whether you are on the hunt for your next great PM or you are looking to step into this exciting career yourself, Nova is probably the right place to go, as we are becoming one of the leading communities where the best Product Managers connect with each other and develop their careers.

Stay tuned for our next issue where we’ll explore more about building successful teams in other careers.

Part 2: Product Management Event

Next week we are hosting a very cool event for those interested in Product careers. Together with ISDI and Shakers, we are hosting an event on how to attract and hire the best Product Managers. Top speakers like Ignacio Moreno (co-founder at Capchase), Miguel González (VP of Engineering at Fever), Miguel Escobar (Product Lead en Tax Down), Angel Agudo (VP of Product at Clarity AI), Olga Sánzhes (Sr Director of Talent at Cabify) and Javier Vidaurreta (Partner in HR at KPMG).