Product Manager

A product manager drives the development of a product or a product line for an organisation. He or she is in charge of the strategy, roadmap and feature definition, amongst many other aspects.

To succeed in this role, you need to know your targeted customers, products and the industry well. It is important to have a vision for the new products you want to introduce to the market. The new products must have some differentiator factors to stand out.

You need to be a good collaborator and you must be very organised and strong at multitasking.

Excellent communication skills are essential as you will be working with and leading cross-functional teams from product conception stage until its official launch. You need to be able to articulate your product vision and its business value clearly so that every team is aligned to the same goal.

You may need to work late sometimes, especially when you manage projects with tight schedules. In the highly competitive world that we live in today, any delay could cost the firm money. This line of job requires you to have a deep sense of responsibility and it can be rather demanding. But, building great products is always exciting, especially the products are very well received by the market.

Your pay is largely dependent on the complexity of the products you are responsible for. The remuneration package can be quite attractive for this role as it often includes share options and bonus schemes. Career prospect wise, this job will need your involvement across different job functions to a certain extent, equipping you with broad scope of knowledge needed to venture into your own business.