Product Manager

Also known as: PM, Product Owner, Senior Product Manager, Group Product Manager, Product Lead.

What does a Product Manager do?

A Product Manager is a manager who decides what the engineering team builds and in what order, and is accountable for the product, or their part of it, moving user and business metrics. They usually have no direct reports: they work through agreements with engineering, design, analytics and marketing.

• study users and the market and choose which problem to solve next;
• form hypotheses and test them through research and A/B tests;
• own the roadmap and backlog and explain to the team and stakeholders why the priorities are what they are;
• track product metrics and decide whether to keep developing a feature or shut it down.

When does a company need a Product Manager?

A company needs a Product Manager when the founder or CTO can no longer decide alone what to build, and the engineering team is growing faster than clear work for it appears. Common triggers: there are several directions competing for the same engineers; sales brings in customer requests and someone has to separate what matters from what is loud. The role will not work if the founder still makes every product decision: the Product Manager becomes a backlog secretary. In that case it is more honest to hire a strong Project Manager or give product authority to a Product Engineer.

Product Manager vs Project Manager: what's the difference?

A Product Manager differs from a Project Manager in owning what to build and why, not how and by when to deliver it. A Project Manager receives a set goal and delivers it on time and on budget; a Product Manager chooses the goal and answers for whether it worked. Product Owner is most often the name of the same role in Scrum teams.

Product Manager vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a Product Manager?

A Product Manager is hard to hire because very different people work under the same title, and product impact is hard to see from the outside.

• The Product Manager title covers both people who run a backlog from ready-made requirements and people who set the product's direction themselves; their CVs look the same.
• Companies expect management experience from a Product Manager, which a Junior cannot have: according to NEWHR's hunting analytics, demand for Junior and Middle Product Managers has dropped noticeably over the past three years.
• A product manager's result is hard to separate from the team's and from the market: a metric going up may be their doing, or it may be seasonality.
• Strong product managers are mostly not actively looking and choose the problem and the team, not only the money.

How much does a Product Manager earn?

According to NEWHR's hunting analytics on product managers for 2024, a Senior Product Manager / Product Owner expects on average a fixed salary of 350−550 thousand roubles a month (gross), and a Product Lead / Head of Product from 500 to 700 thousand roubles. The data covers Russian-speaking IT/Tech specialists working in Russia and abroad. The bonus part is rarely above 15−20%, and when changing jobs candidates focus on the fixed salary.

What to decide before hiring a Product Manager?

• Who makes product decisions now, and are they ready to hand them over? If the founder keeps deciding everything, the Product Manager will leave quickly.
• Which part of the product and which metric will they own? "Develop the product" without a specific metric leads to vague expectations and an argument about results a year later.
• Do you need discovery or delivery? Finding new opportunities and shipping features carefully to an agreed plan are different profiles.
• Is there analytics and access to users? Without data and research a Product Manager decides on gut feeling, and a strong candidate will notice this already at the interview.

Where to find a Product Manager?

Product Managers most often come from product companies with an established product culture: consumer apps, marketplaces, fintech, B2B SaaS, and also from product analytics, engineering and design. A strong signal in a profile is a launch the person owned: a product or a major feature with a clear metric before and after. NEWHR looks for these candidates by the results of their work, not by responses to a job post.

How to assess a Product Manager in an interview?

A Product Manager is assessed with a product case on a real company problem and a review of their past product decisions. In the case the candidate chooses a problem, a metric and a minimal version of the solution, and explains how they would know they were wrong. On the company side, the CPO or founder usually takes part, along with the lead engineer and designer.

Strong signals:

• talks about past decisions through metrics and openly names the ones that did not work;
• asks about users and the business model before proposing features;

Red flags:

• describes the job as running the backlog and holding meetings;
• cannot name a single metric they personally moved;

How long does it take to hire a Product Manager?

We present the first candidates for the Product Manager role within 5–7 days of the brief.

Related roles

• CPO — owns the product strategy of the whole company and leads the product managers.
• AI Product Manager — a Product Manager for AI features, deciding which model errors are acceptable.
• Technical Product Manager — runs a technically complex product: an API, a platform, infrastructure.
• Product Analyst — gives the product manager data and tests their hypotheses.
• Product Engineer — an engineer who decides what to build and often works without a separate product manager.