Meet the new builders [Business Line]

For tech companies, a product manager’s role is becoming quite a crucial one and hence they are becoming quite picky. Product managers have to work with long-term and short-term goals and hence at two speeds – they don’t just launch products, but also work on continuous upgrades on features.

Outbound hiring solutions startup Belong.co surveyed the product manager landscape in India and says it is quite a difficult position to fill. According to Belong’s CTO Vinodh Kumar Ravindranath, currently, there are more than 4,000 job openings for product managers. There are more than 40,000 companies (we are only talking tech/internet firms) in India with a PM or a similar role in their organisations.

So who would make the cut as a product manager? To find out, Belong analysed the educational qualifications of 15,000 product managers in tech firms as well as the hiring pattern of companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft over the last four years. The first surprise finding captured in its report ‘Decoding the Product Manager Hiring Landscape in India’ is that 71 per cent of the product managers it surveyed did not have a software engineering background. Only six per cent had the ‘software engineer + MBA’ tag.

When it looked at who the tech giants hired as product managers when they opted for external candidates (usually people in-house are trained and promoted as PMs), it found that only 23 per cent had prior PM experience. Backgrounds were quite disparate, ranging from engineering to sales and marketing to business analysts to UX designers. However, mid-sized companies by contrast were risk-averse and over 54 per cent of hires for the position had prior product management experience.

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Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/specials/meet-the-new-builders/article9969913.ece