Product Managers Must Adapt
As a Product Manager, it’s your duty to ensure your product team, and by extension, your output constantly evolves.
Building great products isn’t a single skill that is just acquired - it takes years of consistent grunt work to iterate and improve on what’s been done in the past.
The key to this success is continual innovation and aligning your product team with industry trends.
Staying up to date with industry trends is a cornerstone of your learning and evolution as a Product Manager.
To make things easy for you, we’ve compiled a list of the current trends that are beginning to shape the future of innovative product management.
Read on to explore these growing trends and how they might apply to your Product team.
A Surge In Product Management Software
As industries grow and technology becomes more accessible, it’s only natural for software vendors to start addressing common product management problems affecting likely both themselves but also the wider product management industry.
In earlier years product management tools were bulky, unnecessary, and unhelpful.
Either that or merged thoughtlessly with project management tools (a discipline that is entirely separate and should be treated as such).
Luckily, as the art of building great products has evolved, so has the thinking behind it.
Product Managers are now placing more of an emphasis on user experience and customer solutions instead of features and functionality.
This has given rise to tools focusing on gaining customer insights and feedback, while developing your product in line with customer demand using customer roadmaps.
Not only will customers finally get products that actually offer real solutions, but product managers will find iteration and product planning a lot easier, simply by asking their customers what they want.
One of those product management tools is ProductFlare.
The Rise of the Chief Product Officer
Role opportunity in product management is also evolving.
Now, businesses are beginning to seek out Chief Product Officers to head up their Product Management Divisions.
This new role creates more opportunities for companies to reward top performers with a more important role within their organizations.
Senior Product Managers may leverage their current position to climb the corporate ladder to get this Chief Product Officer role and smaller companies may expand their current product management roles to make room for this now critical role in their organizations.
While most product managers are still reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, this trend may begin to decline as the Chief Product Officer takes on this critical product management role.
Currently, there are 169 results that match the search for Chief Product Officer on LinkedIn which means that there’s plenty of opportunities for product managers to grow into c-suite positions and plenty of opportunities for companies to grow their product management competencies.
Product Manager Job Growth is EXPLODING 3x
In the United States alone, we are seeing product manager jobs growing by at least 32% over the last 2 years.
This recent product manager job growth means that there are even more opportunities for recent graduates and there is more room for growth for established product managers and product team members.
We are convinced that the figure is even bigger now in 2020.
As of July 21, 2020, LinkedIn has 78,730 listings for Product Manager jobs the most of which are senior Product Manager jobs.
These job listings further solidify the preeminence of the product management field as a profession, and that growth represents the need for new blood as well as the ascension of seasoned professionals.
The well-prepared product management team member or manager will be apt to take advantage of this growing market so that he can advance his career.
There you have it. While some companies will continue to innovate, others will stagnate and miss out on the benefits of these trends. Will your company take your product manager and product team to the next level or remain the same? Let us know your thoughts on our social media channels.
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