How to Break into Product Management

Bruce is the founder of ProjectManagementHacks.com, a resource for growing IT project managers.

  Career Development  

There is hot demand—and high salaries—for project managers in technology and other industries. In small organizations, product managers are assigned the task of creating a new product from scratch. In contrast, product managers in mature organizations usually focus on optimization, incremental improvements and coordinating with a company’s other products. It is an exciting field where you have the opportunity to make an impact as the “CEO of the product.”

From a certain view, product managers perform many of the activities commonly associated with traditional project work. There are exercises to gather requirements, design and test a product and deliver products on time. However, product managers have additional responsibilities that may be unfamiliar to project managers such as marketing, pricing and business strategy. In addition, product managers face the challenge of seeing their work out in the world where anybody can use it.

Charting the Product Management Landscape
As a discipline, product management is relatively young and evolving. As a highly diverse profession, the following observations will serve to identify the major trends for this career path:

• Technology: The rapid growth of technology and on-demand services (e.g. software as a service, storage as a service and other cloud services) is pushing the demand for product …

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