Senior product: What Does a Senior Product Manager Do?

What Does a Senior Product Manager Do?

Product management and product development are complicated jobs that require many skills and tools. The job has a few roles and responsibilities that stay constant, while some duties change according to the industry, company, and product. Among them, a senior product manager is usually on the front lines for all product-related processes and tasks. 

The senior product manager job title can mean a lot of things in different industries and companies. Some companies may assign them the tasks of a product manager, while in other cases, senior product managers are at the top of the hierarchy. 

In this article, we’ll dive into what senior product managers do, their job description, and their roles & responsibilities. 

Let’s take a look.

What Does a Senior Product Manager Do?

Senior product managers lead product managers while coordinating with engineering, marketing, sales, and other teams. They develop the product requirements and roadmaps, as well as incorporate feedback from customers into the product strategy.  

They usually work alongside senior technical product managers, senior product marketing managers, the director of product management, senior project managers, and other senior managers. The Sr. product manager employees consist of product managers, engineering managers, product marketing experts, design experts, associate product managers, software engineers, financial analysts, and an entire product team. 

Furthermore, senior product managers are responsible for product promotion. They usually develop a long-term vision and strategy for the products. From there, they communicate this strategy with all the stakeholders. 

Senior product managers need a thorough understanding of product management experience, project management, product marketing, tech, and finances. They need to be able to do custom market research, develop budgets, and collaborate with several parties simultaneously. 

The sheer of roles senior product managers have to fulfill justifies the senior product manager salary. However, the national average salary is often overstated in the US because of a few internet-based, SaaS, and eCommerce companies. Giants such as Google, Amazon, and (with massive sizes) have an enormous base salary and total compensation packages. As a result, you’ll find that a senior product manager makes the most money in cities such as San Francisco and New York, where most large companies are headquartered. 

Lastly, senior product managers usually have at least five years of experience in the product industry and a Bachelor’s degree. Most of them also have several certifications from reputable sources. 

Senior Product Manager Job Description

If you consider the professional development of a product manager, you’ll notice how senior product managers become what they are. The senior product manager job description has to be devised while keeping that development in mind. 

Therefore, here’s what a typical senior product manager job description would look like. Keep in mind that this job description isn’t tailored toward a specific industry, rather a general senior product manager job description. 

“We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager with creative skills who is detail-oriented to find patterns and issues. You’ll be overseeing the development process, cooperating with design teams, operation managers, finance teams, and engineering managers. 

As the senior product manager, you’ll work on product plans, project plans, and project development concepts. You’ll be developing a business strategy following the product strategy. Meanwhile, you’ll be taking of your project management duties, which include making budgets, work plans, and ensuring departmental cooperation. 

You’ll also be ensuring that product lifecycle deadlines are met, software development stages are completed on time, and will be communicating updates across all channels. 

Finally, you’ll be analyzing and reporting product data for effective launches. You’ll also be making sure that all quality, usability, and reliability standards are met. 

You need excellent communication skills, leadership qualities, and the ability to multitask. You should be familiar with agile methodologies and software such as Salesforce. 

A Bachelor’s degree is required and additional education, certifications, and skills are welcome.”

To tailor this job description for a specific industry, company, or product, you have to include your company processes and use the appropriate terminology. 

If you’re interested in learning the skills to become a senior product manager, then check out our product management certification courses to help you do just that.

Roles and Responsibilities of a Senior Product Manager 

The roles and responsibilities of a senior product manager may differ based on what industry you’re working in. While the gist of the job remains the same, there might be changes in how you do the job. 

Here are the typical duties of a senior product manager. They may vary from industry to industry and company to company.

1. Continually Collaborate with Teams 

Senior product managers usually oversee the entire product development process – everything from product ideation to product distribution. The whole process requires a lot of communication and collaboration among different departments. 

The product team needs to work alongside the development team, marketing team, sales team, and even recruiters and hiring managers at times. The senior product manager is responsible for making sure all this collaboration is smooth and effective. 

They often work cross-functionally with several departments. As a result, managing cross-functional teams is a significant part of a senior product manager’s job. 

Senior product managers need to develop strong relationships with all these teams, and even third parties in some cases. They need to be able to handle and manage all stakeholders to make sure all product activities and development are on track.  

2. Handling the Product Line Lifecycle 

As a senior product manager, you have to oversee every step of the product line lifecycle. That includes product ideation, strategic planning, tactical initiatives, product vision, product strategy, product roadmap, product development, and product distribution. 

The senior product manager has to provide some sort of input and approval at every single stage. For example, at the company, they need to specify the market requirements with respect to the product using market research. During the product development stage, they have to make sure all resources and tools are available for effective development. At every stage, senior product managers have to collaborate with all parties to make sure everything is staying on track. 

Usually, their duties are the same, whether it’s an existing product or new products. In any case, customer interactions and the user experience help senior product managers make more effective decisions throughout the product line lifecycle.  

3. Managing the Product Analysis and the Market Analysis 

A considerable part of a senior product manager’s job is to perform and analyze the market and strategies related to the product. Therefore, they regularly conduct pricing, competitive, and profitability analyses. 

These analyses help devise new business and product strategies to improve the product’s market position. It also helps improve quality, beat the competition, and help with cost reduction in some cases. 

The research also helps other departments, such as the product line departments, manage their product lines. The real-time data helps them execute their duties better and more accurately. 

Furthermore, working alongside a product marketing manager during these analyses helps the product marketing department. Alternatively, data gathered by the product marketing team supports the senior product manager in his or her analyses. 

4. Creating a Product Strategy 

While the entire product team handles the development of the product strategy, the senior product manager has the final say.  

The senior product manager has to bring together the team that will help develop the strategy. They round up the product owner, product managers, product marketers, and any other product people. 

While the product team works, the senior product manager uses their interdepartmental relationships to influence all the stakeholders into accepting the product strategy. 

They also have to convince the Director of Product Management and the Head of Product Management that the strategy is acceptable. The complex part of this task is proving the product strategy aligns with the goals and vision of the . 

Furthermore, the senior product manager also has to develop a company-wide market plan for the product. That usually involves working with multiple departments at the same time, therefore, requiring excellent collaboration and communication skills. 

5. Handling the Recruitment 

Another major part of a senior product manager’s job is to interview, onboard, and train new product employees. They might also get involved in planning, directing, and delegating tasks for some of the employees. 

As a result, they’re also responsible for performance appraisals, problem resolution, and rewarding employees. 

Senior product managers assist the human resources department with hiring new product people by providing insights. Furthermore, they may also have to report any issues or problems among the management people to the appropriate people. 

6. Other Roles and Responsibilities 

Senior product managers may have more roles and responsibilities depending on the industry or they work with. They may be responsible for product promotion, pushing sales, and may even work on core product functionalities. 

At times, senior product managers attend trade shows to represent the product or business they’re associated with. 

All in all, depending on the company, industry, product, and other factors, there may be some minor changes in the senior product manager’s roles and responsibilities.  

Becoming a Senior Product Manager 

The product management field requires a lot of experience, knowledge, and drive. Becoming a senior product manager may take years without the right set of skills and knowledge. 

However, the first step to becoming an excellent senior product manager is to understand their roles and responsibilities. While those responsibilities may be subject to change, having a general idea of them is enough. 

As a recruiter, you need to make sure you get the senior product manager job description right. Tailor it to your industry, company, and product so candidates can understand the exact requirements of the job.  

If you are new to product management and are looking to break into your first product role, we recommend taking our Product Manager Certification Course, where you will learn fundamentals of product management, launch your own product, and get on the fast track towards landing your first product job.

What Does a Senior Product Manager Do for Their Daily Work? | by Annie Dai

“A successful product manager can not only help direct the path of the product but can also direct the path of the company.”-AIPMM

Product manager is the most important role to promote the success of a product. Product manager is different from project manager, they can not only communicate with various department smoothly but also has the strong ability to persuade others.Communication, is a necessity and one of the most important capabilities of a product manager. They are usually divided into novice product manager and senior product manager. Senior product managers have much more job responsibilities than that of novice product managers. So what does a senior product manager do?

Novice product managers are mostly on the internship period. At this stage, they care more about how to learn the product strategies and planning from the senior product manager. In a big company, there must be one senior product manager tutor several newbies. They will deal more with people from other departments, like, designers, developer and so on. So they need to understand what is interaction design, what is prototyping design, and some basic development languages.

The novice product manager main job responsibilities are :

• Writing the PRD
• Communicate with developers, designers, and other related departments
• Help senior product manager to collect user feedback
• Prototyping design

The main responsibility of senior product manager is the product strategy and planning. She or he is the decision maker and supervisor that can guide the product in the right direction. They have huge power to decide what to do, or what not to do. They required strong persuasion ability to persuade others and often think about what kind of product can make a good profit. They have good logical thinking and excellent communication skills but also have leadership skills to guide the team.

• Set the profit goal for product
• Develop and implement product strategy and development planning
• Analyze the user needs and feedback
• Communicate with senior department and provide the report of product progress
• Supervise the project management
• Promote and introduce the product for the later period

• Project management skills(35%)
• Personal ability (15%)
• Business capacity(20%)
• Technical capacity(15%)
• Ability to communicate and deal with conflicts(15%)

(1) Read books and website resource as many as possible

Learning website:

• Silicon Valley Product Group
• Product Talk
• PM at Microsoft
• Clever PM
• Ken Norton

Advanced Books:

• Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
• Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
• Do not Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work by Deborah Tannen

(2) Learn from your competitors

(3) Learn some new tools

• Trello (task management tool)
• Typeform (online free questionnaire creation tool)
• Product Center by Ramen (user research tools)
• Mockplus (the fastest and high-efficient prototyping tools)
• Google doc. (document processing tools)

(4) Communication is the key, talk to people frequently.

(5) Experience is the teacher, accumulate experience and analyze it.

According to Glassdoor’s survey, senior product managers now earn $ 158,271 per year and the demand for product managers is growing faster than ever before. Many companies are aware of the importance of product managers in driving and succeeding in their products.

The product manager is the leader, coordinator, agitator in the product management, but he is not the boss. Although he has a great deal of power to manage product development and can intervene in all stages of the product lifecycle, it does not administratively have its own subordinates as the average manager does. Still, he needs to maintain sound coordination and cooperation with other departments to promote the product, so to be a good product manager is is not easy and requires much time/skills investment.

For a large company, the product manager is a very important role. Because the product manager is responsible for the success or failure of the entire product, he has the right to intervene from development, production to sales. But the situation in small companies is not the same, the power of PM will be relatively small. Because different companies have different requirements for product managers, but the first thing for them is to meet the requirement of the company at least.

Product managers play an important role in the entire product lifecycle. It is not easy to be an excellent product manager. I hope you have got your answers about what does a senior product manager do after reading this post.

Product Manager/Senior Product Manager from a direct employer at Simple. Moscow

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Responsibility:

• Formation of the product development strategy.
• Project management, task setting and interaction with developers and designers to implement site improvements in accordance with the plan.
• Collecting information about the status of tasks and leading their implementation.
• Participation in the formation of the backlog and the search for bugs.
• Analytics on user behavior within the product and suggestion of changes.
• Personalization and recommendations: launching campaigns and leading the necessary development.

Required competencies:

• Higher education.
• At least 4 years of experience in a similar position (preferably in e-commerce).
• Knowledge of development processes, experience of interaction with development.
• Knowledge of frameworks: JTBD, user research, RAT, CJM, HADI.
• Proficiency in MS Office, Redmine/Jira, Figma, Miro, Dynamic yield (will be a plus).
• Knowledge of SQL and ability to write database queries would be an advantage.
• Initiative, openness, optimism, multitasking, analytical mindset.

We offer:

• Registration according to the Labor Code of the Russian Federation.
• Salary conditions are discussed with the successful candidate individually.
• Schedule 5/2 (10:00 – 19:00).
• Office at Polezhaevskaya metro station (soon we will move to Minskskaya metro station).

Office: Convenient location of the office within walking distance from the metro station Polezhaevskaya, Khoroshevskaya, well-developed infrastructure. Each floor has equipped kitchens, coffee points and meeting rooms.

Health: After passing the probationary period, we provide an excellent VHI program, including dentistry, insurance for traveling abroad, and a hospital.

Training: The company regularly conducts internal and external corporate trainings. Employees are provided with corporate discounts for training at the Enotria wine school.

Bonuses: Corporate programs with partners Skyeng, Rendez-Vous, Samsung, Delimobil and many others. Gifts for Birthday, New Year, March 8 and February 23.

Type of employment

Full

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How to create products for the older generation – all the subtleties that you must consider

Business projects focused on the needs of older people are today considered among the most promising in developed countries. This segment is called the “silver economy”, and investment advisors in developed economies, for example, in Germany, recommend investing free funds in such startups – the market will only grow.

The number of innovations in this sector is off scale, however, the classic set of care services remains in demand. In Russia, the situation is different – as far as we can see, there is no demand for quality old age either from older people themselves or from their environment.

Older people are not looking for tech, adventurous travel and 60+ dating services. For these people, the family seeks help when it is no longer possible to cope with the problem without outside support. This means that a travel startup aimed at an older audience is unlikely to take off in Russia now, but a babysitter may well be needed.

What are the features of marketing for projects in the field of the “silver economy” in Russia?

The client is not the customer

While developing a strategy for our Pomoguru project, we determined that our target audience includes two elements – the customer and the client. If the clients are just those older people who need help and care, then the customers are their younger relatives who come for the service. We must refer to these two age categories in order to achieve the optimal result.

Business advice: Consider the complex chain of interaction when creating products and services for older customers. Selling services to people 70+, we understand that generation 40+ will most likely pay for them. It is with them, for the most part, that direct work will take place.

Stigmatization of the market

The Russian market of services for caring for elderly relatives is very strongly stigmatized, all talk about this is closely associated with feelings of guilt. For some reason, it is customary for us to think that in old age a person should no longer want anything – look, they say, in your passport, what desires you may have.

On the other hand, the elderly themselves support this thought – “I don’t need anything, I’ll give the apartment to my grandchildren, I’ll live in a corner myself so as not to interfere. ” Such a view interferes with a decent life. And society only reinforces this idea. At the same time, if we think from the position not of sacrificial psychology, but of maintaining a high quality and standard of living at any age, then the same apartment can be issued in a reverse mortgage or in insurance for “old age” in order to receive a decent monthly income from a bank or company. amount.

Another psychological moment that concerns caring for older people is the belief that you certainly need to look after your parents yourself and invite a nurse for this – it’s a shame, it’s like signing your insolvency.

Our nurses are most often hired when everything is really bad – there is not enough knowledge and skills or burnout has set in. There is also no accepted practice in Europe for hiring a companion.

Business advice: market stigmatization is its current state. It takes a lot of time and hard work to change this approach. It is not necessary to organize revolutions and quickly introduce new standards – on the contrary, the approach to the beliefs of customers needs to be very careful and accurate.

“Sales Psychologist”

It is important that people with an understanding of the psychology of the client work in both sales and marketing in this segment. Issues are delicate, and each should be approached individually. A complex chain of interactions (client – customer – contractor) requires us to understand the needs at all levels: we need to build trusting communication with all links in the chain. So in this matter, one cannot do without a developed emotional intelligence.

Our main client is an older person, not in the best health, often with confirmed dementia. This feature of the staff should always be borne in mind – you need to be patient and understanding. Therefore, among our account managers there are many people of age, with great life experience, empathy.

They are the ones customers or clients call—often anxious, frightened people who think they are making a mistake, that they will be blamed for not being able to do it themselves. Each individual conversation lasts from half an hour, and this is normal. When a relative develops dementia, the whole family suffers. And here, accurate and trusting communication with a company that is trusted by an older person is especially important.

Advice to entrepreneurs: take into account the psychological characteristics of two generations at once – clients and customers, practice a particularly careful and delicate approach at all stages of interaction with a client. Carefully select a team that can interact in this way.

Complicated feedback

Feedback is complex. Why?

• Usually, clients are very shy and cannot express their needs directly.
• There is a strong gap between the needs of the client and the customer. More often than not, communication comes from the customer, not the client.
• Most clients are not very technologically advanced – they are afraid of gadgets, new technological solutions, and this is a fact that must be accepted. Of course, children and grandchildren can help clients. But you shouldn’t count on it much – therefore, the feedback system should take into account the need to use “conservative” channels and methods of interaction. However, we try to mix the old with the new – for example, our nurses make a video resume, according to which you can get a first impression of a person, and we receive daily reports in instant messengers in text and audio formats.

Advice for entrepreneurs: both the client and the customer need to be encouraged to evaluate services and products. Often relatives are afraid to complain about the service – all of a sudden they will treat the client differently later. Therefore, we are always very grateful to those customers and customers who complain, as this helps us improve the service. We advise other colleagues to implement this practice and initiate openness in communication with clients.

No faith in advertising

Another important nuance is that few people believe in advertising in this area. In France or Israel, nursing homes do not need advertising – everyone already knows them and go there for help. In Germany, advertisements for nursing homes hang next to the tourist brochures in the subway.

In a growing new market, you need to be able to promote yourself. So far, word of mouth and reliable recommendations work best for us. Also, in our opinion, advertising through doctors can work, but we are just starting to work in this direction. We talk about ourselves, take them on excursions to our flagship geriatric centers.

Advice to entrepreneurs: use different persuasion methods, don’t focus on standard advertising methods. Together with other market participants, try to develop a unified system of quality standards that will help the customer better navigate the opportunities and advantages of the market.

Features of marketing

Marketing for an age audience has its own specifics. This applies to the channels themselves for obtaining information, and key messages, as well as design subtleties.

Traditional advertising

We use traditional advertising channels such as billboards. In Europe, our colleagues actively use advertising in public transport and print.

Social networks and bloggers

At the same time, you should not focus only on conservative advertising tools. In this area, it also makes sense to conduct active campaigns in social networks and the Internet. The latter works very well – contextual advertising in search engines, as well as Facebook. At the same time, Instagram did not work for us at all, this network requires mainly entertainment and youth content.

At present, attracting bloggers and influencers gives good results in various areas, we understand this and will think about how to use this channel of interaction with the audience.

A new trend that can be applied to the services segment for the 60+ category is the use of educational content as a way to attract customers. Creating schools for relatives of the elderly, developing online seminars and webinars to give them the basics and knowledge in the right area is a good marketing tool with high efficiency and should be treated carefully. Today it is a great way to market your products and services.

Design nuances

Our field has its own peculiarities and canons of external presentation of information. For example, in the West, high-tech videos with a strong emotional component are gaining popularity, which describe the novelties of the market for socialization, health control and improving the physical well-being of adult clients. But for the Russian market, these methods do not work so well yet.

Other methods most often work for us – a fairly simple and clear design, laconic graphics, large, clear and readable font. The same applies to key messages – they should be as clear as possible, regardless of whether they are expressed in images, words or slogans.

We were guided by all this when creating our sites. There is a minimum of any fashionable “tricks”. This was done not for reasons of economy, but in order to tell about yourself as simply, calmly and accessible as possible.

How to get the maximum

• Remember that your target audience is both customers and clients. And with each one you need to build a special communication.
• Pay attention to the quality of communication in any interaction and feedback.
• Consider the specifics of the Russian market and its stigmatization, treat clients, customers, and colleagues with patience and warmth.
• Use word of mouth 2.0 – recommendations and customer reviews on blogs and social networks, develop marketing with educational content.