A friend asked me, how long can a product manager be? How long will product managers last? Can you be a product manager for life?

1. The life of a product manager

There used to be no product manager, but the job in the company has long existed.

Originally called a demand analyst, this position is still being traditionally hired by companies today. Internet product managers are also the main candidates.

Early requirements analysts were designed to disassemble business and system architecture requirements, not involving user interaction, operational strategy, but figuring out what systems are needed, what functions are needed, and what hardware configurations are needed.

Demand analyst a similar to the work of technical translation, demand analysts will be given by the business department of the company’s customer requirements for business rules, business scope, business process and other aspects of the technical analysis, the output of these requirements into the development engineers understand the language, such as common UML unified modeling language,…

A product manager is a person who is responsible for product management in the Internet. The product manager is mainly responsible for user survey, industry data analysis, and then according to the needs of users, deciding which products to develop, which business model to choose, and promoting the development organization of corresponding products.

What is the difference between a product manager doing demand research and a demand analyst doing demand analysis?

The biggest difference is that the former is biased towards product functions, while the latter is not only the business requirements on system functions, but also the needs of users, user scenarios, and the product design functions that appear in the research and analysis of competitive products under similar products.

Before there was a product manager, there was a position called implementation consultant, whose main job was to complete the deployment of their own systems based on the customer’s business using system scenarios and actual field requirements.

For ERP engineers, their main task is to make THE ERP software run. In the process of making the software run well, ERP engineers also need to coordinate various resources

The ERP products I am responsible for are standardized, and standardized products need to be deleted, modified and checked according to customer scenarios. The job of the implementation consultant is to include requirements analysis, but the most important thing is to ensure that the product can be used in customer scenarios and delivered. Generally, this includes the cost of the customer’s purchase of the product. The longer the implementation time of the consultant, the more the customer needs to pay.

Many implementation consultant also involves access to customized demand, only by developing their products have no ability, but this kind of demand are generally smaller demand, not involve major changes to the system as a whole, because this is equivalent to the customer to spend money to hire a outsourcing team work, the cost of certainly cheaper than looking for outsourcing company directly.

2. The skills of a product manager are constantly changing

In 2020, because of the epidemic, many places began to produce a strong demand for telecommuting; Here’s a hot remote design office tool: Figma.

Many product managers and designers around me are learning about the advantages of collaborative work brought by this new tool. At the same time, the tool itself has a large number of atomic components that can be defined, which greatly improves the collaborative efficiency of designers.

For example, Figma’s built-in interactive actions include jumping, displaying floating layers, opening links, etc., while triggering effects include click, hover, delay, and rolling fixed effects, which are sufficient to create some basic interactive effects. This requires product managers to constantly learn new skills.

So to be a lifelong product manager, you need to constantly learn new skills and new tools that your upstream and downstream work departments need.

3. No future product manager position

In the future, with the breakdown of the work scene, I’m sure the name of the product manager won’t exist. For example, in Tencent, they are called product planning and product operation. At the same time, there is no product manager position in Alibaba, but product strategy.

All of the above positions include product manager, but the names don’t fit. And that’s why if you’re going to be a product manager for the rest of your life, you have to know that product managers are going to be in the industry in the future.

4. Can you be a product manager for life?

We used to get it through crawlers and now the product managers on the market are mostly in their mid to late 20s. The main reasons why the proportion of product managers after the age of 30 is so small are as follows:

The position is limited by the working environment.

As we get older, fewer product managers are able to stay up all night working on requirements and product design. It is very rare to find a product manager in the market who is more than 5 years old. Also more than 10 years of product managers are either not a new line of business, or their own financial investment.

So product managers can either move on to co-management or change careers.

5. The Sankei manager is too focused

The students who just started as product managers must work in three points: requirement research, documentation and prototype design.

From a page, to a function to a product function planning design in three points.

New product 1-3 years, is to continue to work with the above 3 points of experience to accumulate cases. After 3 years, you will find that no matter how many new features are essentially the same.

Even modular, stylized product designs are on the street.

What new products appear in the eyes of this kind of product manager seems to be nothing more than some pages, logic, and algorithm, find the corresponding solution can be solved or re-pieced together.

In a word, once I did my best to understand and fix the product requirements, and even tried to add some innovations. Now I only need to use the functions to meet the needs of the boss, business and customers.

Know when to work, productivity is the first.

6. With lifelong product thinking, the most valuable

Those of you who have been product managers know that there is an important idea: MVP, which I refer to in Simple Design as “low cost implementation.” This thinking can be applied to all aspects of an ordinary person’s life, such as decoration, entrepreneurship and financial management.

This approach to product design in small steps can be applied to any field. At the same time, have an iterative thinking, to do anything. Even work has minimal resources to leverage maximum resources

If you have worked as a product manager for more than a year, then product thinking will be very deep in the brain, but the premise is to do the work of a product manager

That’s why people like to be product managers, always like the way product managers think. Explore, innovate, and try new things. Always be hungry.

To learn more about the product manager, you can follow the official account “Kevin Changes the World”, and you can also add vx: KevingBsjDDD0123 for more information