Product Manager

Career Area: Marketing and Public Relations

Occupation Group: Marketing Specialists

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Product Manager earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $92,612

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $95,147

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Manages and coordinates all the processes involved in creating a product. Oversees work involved with product design, production, distribution, marketing and sales.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Product Manager is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Planning: Working experience with the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve desired goals.
• Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Product Management: Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
• Product Development: In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market.
• Project Management: Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
• Product Sales: Demonstrated expertise in the selling of an artifact that is produced, is quantifiable, and can be either an end item in itself or a component item.
• Market Research: Market research (also in some contexts known as Industrial Research) is any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Product Manager that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Articulating Value Propositions: Working experience of Articulating Value Propositions. Value proposition refers to a business or marketing statement that a company uses to summarize why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement convinces a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings will. Companies use this statement to target customers who will benefit most from using the company's products, and this helps maintain an economic moat.
• Pricing Strategy: Experience optimizing the price of a product or service to fulfill a stated corporate strategy. This could be maximizing profitability, defend an existing market from new entrants, to increase market share within a market, or to enter a new market.
• Product Design: Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers.
• Business Case Analysis: Working experience of Business Case Analysis, which can be defined as a decision support and planning tool that projects the likely financial results and other business consequences of an action or investment.
• Business Strategy: Strategic management is the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by a company's top management on behalf of owners, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization competes.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Product Manager
• Senior Product Manager
• Category Manager
• Associate Product Manager
• Lead Product Manager

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Marketing Manager (General)