The current market is dominated by many start-ups which are coming up with the most innovative products of all time – both digital and physical, across industries and verticals. In fact, as per an article by Economic Times, data until December 20, 2021, showed that the seed-stage deals dominated with nearly 396 deals aggregating to $705.86 million, and about 166 investments at series A amounted to about $1.67 billion.
With the increase in the start-up culture and accelerating transformation to become more user-friendly and centric, Product Management has emerged as one of the most pivotal elements of business strategy in today’s world. And so have Product Managers.
- Who are Product Managers?
- What does a Product Manager do?
- Did the Pandemic Affect Product Management as a Function in India?
- What is the Future of Product Management?
Read More: Everything you need to know about product management
Who are Product Managers?
In a typical start-up, the role of the product manager in the first 2-3 years (depending on the growth) is generally played by the founder or co-founders as they are the ones who are responsible for driving the growth, owning the product visions, goal, strategy, and roadmap. But as these start-ups evolve by securing high growth and million-dollar funding to become a unicorn, the co-founders create a layer of product managers to lead the respective products. Eventually, these product managers or product owners lead the products independently and are expected to be solely responsible for product-led growth while being answerable to all the stakeholders.
What does a Product Manager do?
A product management job is one of the most challenging data-driven jobs in the world. It is one of the highly coveted roles in the present job market and plays an instrumental role in the business’s core strategy. You can check out the product management free course to further your learning of the concept.
However, the field of product management is continually evolving. A Product Manager’s Key Responsibility Areas depend on their industry or organization. There is a great deal of difference between the skills or job roles of product managers depending on factors like B2B and B2C, the size of the company, the industry, the product framework being deployed, and the product itself. But despite this disparity, all the product managers’ roles boil down to driving product growth and successful user adoption.
Read More: What is the Role of a Product Manager?
Did the Pandemic Affect Product Management as a Function in India?
A McKinsey report showed that firms across the globe accelerated tech adoption by five years because of the pandemic. So, the pandemic gave an impetus to the hiring trends in the digital product management space. Coming to India, hiring trends in India didn’t alter, but they got amplified. Product Managers in India are in huge demand across all sectors from agriculture to automobiles. Some opportunity sectors such as ed-tech, fintech services, healthcare, and digital marketing firms are even posting a hiring surge for Product Managers in India.
Since product managers are pivotal to a company’s success, their roles are highly sought-after and command high salaries and respect in society and among working professionals. And Indian incorporations are no exception to that. It is not just the high salaries that the product managers command; they also have a well-defined and promising career path leading to consulting and strategy roles as heads. Data science and analytics are other verticals open to the product manager to dig deeper into. After all, product managers are at the centre of all business strategies today.
What is the Future of Product Management?
The future of product management is quite promising across the globe as well as in India. The GoI programs such as the Make in India initiative have led to sudden acceleration in the number of digital start-ups, accentuating the demand for product management roles. But the future belongs to data-driven start-ups or data-driven companies. And therefore, data-driven product management roles will be in high request. A future product manager must have the necessary skills in data and analytics, user psychology, domain research, and of course, the technology field.
In India, the number of product management jobs will double, as per a report by Google. Also, industry experts believe that many of these product management professionals will come from tech or dot-com companies.
That is why you must enrol in the PG Program in Product Management and Analytics, as it can help teach you how to develop a mindset that anchors product strategy as the pathway to growth. Whether you want to launch a new product strategy or need to manage the lifecycle of existing ones, the program can teach approaches used by many of the top technology-driven companies in the world today.
