


#Product manager salary california software
Casey McGuigan, product manager at software maker Infragistics, says that in particular, “Data should always be top of mind and at the center of all decisions. Data and analytical savvyīut a great product manager needs hard skills as well as soft ones. It puts you in the right mindset and somehow makes it obvious what needs more polish.” 3.
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“A great way to get there is picturing yourself explaining to a good friend or family member how to use that feature. “A great product manager feels the urge to make things simpler and easier for their users,” explains Vincent Paquet, CPO of Dialpad, which makes AI-powered communications software for contact centers and other businesses. “Whether you call that EQ or something less buzzy, it’s the soft skills that make great product managers.”Īnd empathy too isn’t necessarily an inborn quality - it’s a skill that you can develop if you want to find success in this field. “You also need to understand, balance, and mold the perspectives from multiple functional areas - dev, stakeholders, design, etc. Shane Quinlan, director of product management at software development firm Kion, says that empathy with potential customers is just one part of the picture. “Too many products fail, despite being technically brilliant or aesthetically beautiful, because they serve no unmet need and therefore find no customer adoption.” “Empathy is essential because product managers need to always keep in mind the raison d’être of their products - who will use them, and why will customers change habits to adopt a new product?” says Microshare’s Paumelle. But in fact, almost all the experts we spoke to cited it as a key quality an elite product manager should have. You may not be used to hearing someone say that an ability to empathize is a business skill. “Given that this role can emerge from various backgrounds, including customer success, sales, marketing, or development, a real opportunity presents itself because effective communicators can empathize with the users and translate priorities back to the business,” she says. “Product managers must juggle all these competing agendas and secure alignment from all these parties to get a successful product out.”Ĭommunication skills are so in demand that good communicators from a wide variety of backgrounds can use them to enter this field, says Cait Porte, who is chief marketing officer at software development company Digibee and has a background in product management. “Products are a result of multiple components and know-how they require the involvement of many people across an organization and its business partners - in engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, security, marketing, sales, customer support, finance, etc.,” says Charles Paumelle, chief product officer and co-founder of Microshare, a smart building data solutions company. In fact, much of your job will be learning how to get all of these audiences to communicate with one another, with you often serving as a mediator.
