Junior, Middle, and Senior Product Manager
Like any other IT profession, Product Managers can be Junior, Middle, and Senior. But what are the differences?
Junior Product Manager is an entry-level position that doesn’t require much experience. It can be less than a year of working at any position in a development team, for instance, as a designer or coder. The responsibilities of these positions are the main PM duties and tasks but on a smaller scale than the whole project. For instance, he or she can be responsible for a certain product area, e.g., interface design, or work on a whole project but a small one. Basically, it is an assistant role for a more experienced PM who delegates some parts of their work.
Basic requirements/features of a Junior position:
- Knowledge of the basics of product management, i.e., roles, definitions, frameworks, understanding of the hypothesis testing principles, etc.
- Ability to create and follow templates/scripts. For instance, conduct an interview using a script or create a script using a template.
- Good communication skills.
- Ability to identify and satisfy the need of a certain user or an interested party.
- Being able to help the team meet the sprint deadlines.
- Knowledge of Five whys (or 5 whys) is an iterative interrogative technique;
- Knowledge of techniques for prioritizing the backlog.
- Knowledge of quality metrics.
- Knowledge of analytics basics;
- Knowledge of teamwork frameworks (Scrum, Kanban).
- User Story Mapping.
Middle Product Manager is a position that requires at least half a year to one year of experience in PM position. For instance, it can be acquired in a big company working on a side-project. It is the next step after Junior position which means that it has more duties and tasks, i.e., more areas of responsibility, bigger products.
Basic requirements/features of a Middle PM position:
- Responsibility for the whole product or its major part, formation of backlog, i.e., the amount of work that should be done, setting up the roles for is implementation, etc.
- Ability to develop the project from the start till the end based on the provided Key Performance Indicator (KPI). For instance, a set KPI can be to increase the online store conversion by 3% in the next quarter.
- Ability to identify the needs of the segments and solve them. This implies an ability to work with a large audience, determine its needs and propose solutions to create a product that will satisfy them.
- Ability to make an estimate of the potential revenue and optimize the costs. He or she is also responsible for Unit economics calculation and budget allocation within the team.
- Experience working with the marketing team to ensure the delivery of the value to the end-consumer. It implies the creation of a promotion plan.
- Interaction with other departments, e.g., support, logistics, etc.
- The planning horizon is 3-6 months.
Senior Product Manager is a team leader who leads and controls Middle and Junior PMs. To become a professional in the field and be able to undertake a Senior position, you need to have at least three years of experience working as Senior Product Manager
Basic requirements/features of a Senior PM position:
- Expertise in the industry for which the product is created.
- Decision making about the development of new products, expansion to the new markets, segments;
- Experience in management of major service or product line;
- Ability to create and defend a product development strategy in front of the owner, top managers, shareholders, strategic committee, takes part in strategic sessions.
- Ability to build product processes, select frameworks.
- Expertise in managing budgets for the entire product, teams.
- Planning horizon is more than 6 months. It implies identifying trends, new segments and markets, planning product placement base on the analysis of the competitors, etc.
- Knowledge and practice custom metrics, use Pyramid of Metrics, NSM (North Star Metric).
- Knowledge of Competitive Intelligence.
- Deep understanding of analytics and statistics, the ability to make long-term decisions based on them.
- Knowledge of scalable hypothesis testing processes with minimal investment of money/time.
- Deep knowledge and understanding of monetization and business models