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How to become a successful product manager: courses that are being taught right now

Today it is difficult to imagine a startup or any IT business without a product manager. And as soon as developers and customers found a common language, when there were no product managers?

As is the case with many leadership positions, this profession is difficult to learn from scratch - it leads to a long career path, the study of many aspects about the industry and the company itself.



However, this path can be accelerated with the help of professional courses, where the beginner specialist is given every opportunity to become an excellent manager. In this article, we consider the importance of the profession in modern business, current statistics on its relevance in the world, as well as specialized training centers for the training of product managers in Russia and neighboring countries.



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What does the product manager do and what does it give



For starters, it's best to explore the very nature of this profession. It would seem that the name itself - product manager , or product manager (from the English product manager) - speaks for itself. But not everything is so obvious: the functions and responsibilities of the product manager overlap with many other specialists responsible for the fate of the product at the design stage (for example, project manager) or its release to the market (product development manager, marketing manager).

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The truth is that a product manager is a manager who is responsible for the success of a product at all its stages. That is, the entire product life cycle, defined by a specific project in a particular company, is a direct area of ​​responsibility of this specialist. It is from its submission that the concept of development, development and active promotion of the product is determined in order to achieve the greatest financial success of the event.



This is not a complete list of what a product manager should be able to do and execute:





Simply put, the real product manager is considered to be the specialist who knows what the client wants, finds out what the working team is capable of, counts the estimated profit - and implements it into a product that is successful in all respects. Responsibility and a real shine in the eyes when promoting a product are also elements of a mandatory program for a product manager.



The popularity of the profession of product manager in numbers



Obviously, a product manager is an important figure in product development and in the IT world as a whole. Nevertheless, even the most interesting and attractive position does not cost anything without a dry, but such necessary statistics. And, fortunately, product managers do not have to complain about the lack of demand.



According to one of the most popular job search portals in the US, Indeed.com, there are about 18,000 options for this profession. The leaders are the state of California (about 4,500 vacancies) with its eminent Silicon Valley and New York (about 1,700 vacancies).



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Screenshot of the search for the query “Product manager” (as of 10.22.2018)



Regarding the situation in the Russian labor market, we will look at the most current data from the hh.ru website: a fairly large number of open vacancies are issued for finding all possible keys with the name of the profession - “product manager”, “product manager” and “product manager” .



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Screenshot of the search query “Product Manager” (as of 10/22/2018)



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Screenshot of the search for the query “Product manager” (as of 10.22.2018)



The total result in the Russian Federation is from 1.5 to 2.2 thousand relevant vacancies for each of the requests. The first three places are as follows:





Belarus and Ukraine also have a considerable number of open vacancies for product managers. The same hh.ru gives statistics - about 100 current vacancies for each of the countries with the traditional largest number of vacancies in the capitals, Minsk and Kiev.



A few words about the average salary. The obvious fact: as in any managerial position, wages directly depend on experience. The more of it, the higher the probability (without a 100% guarantee) to claim a high salary. Yes, and each individual company with each individual project may offer a different reward to the product manager.



All for the same fresh data from the sites Indeed.com and hh.ru, experts can definitely count on the following minimum wages:





According to another interesting study conducted in Silicon Valley, the average annual salary of product managers (over $ 133K) already in many cases exceeds the salary of developers.



Where to learn to be a cool product manager



So, at the moment we managed to find out the following: the product manager is one of those positions that is really worth developing on it, and the number of proposals for which is good. However, who exactly can become a product manager?



There are two ways of development:



The first is coming to product management after a lot of tested IT professions: a specialist can start as a developer, then try team building, then go to project management or create some kind of own product idea and try to implement it within the company. This method is very common, because the product manager is a logical continuation of a successful career of an intelligent, having a decent working experience as a specialist.



The second way is direct learning. Everything can start as a special higher education (project management, management, etc.) and continue in the form of so-called refresher courses, which last from two days, in the format of seminars and master classes, up to 2-3 months in the form of full-fledged study days with related theory and practice.



Which way to choose is the choice for everyone, and everything comes from personal goals, motivation and expressed professional need. Below we will list those centers and courses in which each specialist can improve their skills, gain new knowledge in the subject area and transfer everything to practice.



Courses for product managers



There are two main areas of training. Classical training - full-time courses, which include 1-2 lectures a week for a couple of months. Another way to gain knowledge of product management is to take an online course with instructional video lectures and send homework by e-mail to the course manager. Both approaches are convenient in their own way and equally effective.



Full-time courses:





Online courses:





Conclusion



In fact, a person becomes a product manager not at the time of training or in the work on any project. This is an ideological state, when all your desires and ideas begin to find intersections with existing knowledge, technical capabilities and the demand for this idea among other people. Therefore, any steps towards self-development are important and extremely useful for any specialist.



If you had your own personal experience in teaching this profession through any courses or master classes, share your impressions in the comments to our article, we would be interested to know about it!

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/427537/



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