What do product assistant (specialist), product manager, senior product manager, product director look like?

Title is not your position, perhaps a product manager’s title is currently working as a product specialist.

Engaged in products from 2014 to 2018, more than 4 years. From the beginning of product sharing, I shared my product experience and perception on various product platforms, and gradually made many product friends. Now I have close to 4000 wechat friends, so I can talk about the growth path from product assistant to product director under the current position of OSS product principal.

Many friends add me, always ask: “just entered the product, what should I do first?” “What do you learn if you want to make a product?”

I got quite a few of those same answers. To that end, I’m going to share my product path and talk about how I went from product assistant (specialist) to product manager, senior product manager, and now product owner.

I hope that after reading this article, you can help product people find common ground, you can quickly locate the current stage, of course, there is one point to note:

Title is not your position, perhaps a product manager’s title is currently working as a product specialist

Product Specialist (Product Assistant)

When I worked in Tencent, I served as product manager for both product operation and product planning. Tencent’s product system is classified as P1/P2/P3 (the later, the higher the product grade), but at the beginning, the work content of product operation and product planning is basically the same, and P1 is called product assistant (product specialist).

First of all, product assistants are mainly for fresh graduates, or those who are in transition or change industries to do product work. Now, with the rise of the product industry, many product training and operation training institutions have sprung up.

After training or those who need to change careers, product assistant is their first choice. Of course, some companies call it product specialist or even product manager

Product assistant is the start of product career, and the routine work of product assistant is as follows:

Document writing, product testing, operation activities, new media, customer docking, product training

The routine work of the product assistant is listed here. Since the product assistant is the starting point, the corresponding work is “miscellaneous” work around the product. The miscellaneous work I say here is more detailed or repetitive work.

As an aside, it takes about 3-12 months to get started as a product assistant. According to my advanced situation, talk about the routine content of the above several jobs

• Operation activities: responsible for the implementation of activities, cooperate with operation personnel to launch activities, and brush points online; Lay out the venue below the line

• Testing: Continuously functional testing of the product, what we call point by point, to see if every function of the product works, and if the pop-up page has any errors or illogical situations.

• Write documents: patent description, MRD, PRD, PPT

• New media: Publish articles on the official account of the product and check the daily data of the new media account

• Product training: explain the function of the product, train internal staff or customers

• 
  

This is a list of my work as a product assistant. Of course, there is a lot of decentralization. For example, when I was a product assistant, I was mainly engaged in new media, product training and operation activities.

A final digression from the job of product assistant:

Product assistant is the qualitative beginning of product career development. The following figure is the possible direction of product transformation

[Product Assistant Development Direction]

I believe that every student who makes products has a “personal passion to change the world or hope to be different from the world”. Therefore, I suggest that product assistants should first identify your enterprise and industry.

If the enterprise is a traditional enterprise product assistant needs, you may learn to be more pre-sales engineer work, training lecturer; Of course, if it is an Internet or a traditional enterprise in transition, product assistant may become the development direction of product manager, designer and operation manager.

As a product assistant, I think it is the most critical period for a product person’s career. However, many of my friends also care about the industry’s experience and worry that the industry will affect their career development.

I think the friend who just graduated does not need to care too much about the industry, and can even do several popular industries. Although the product work has soft ability, it also has hard ability. Industry experience is one of the soft capabilities

[Product Industry differentiation]

When I was a product assistant, I lacked both hard and soft skills. In this period, when I was in urgent need of growth, the industry was not important. After all, it’s not sales. You don’t need to accumulate customer resources. What you need to do is:

What work does the product work need to do? What can be done? What is not the product of work? What are the corresponding specifications?

The above three questions reflect on their own, is it done? If not, you probably still need to learn. If so, you might want to consider your next step.

Recommended salary: 4-12K(according to different platforms in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen)

The product manager

After 3 to 12 months of growth, you may have sorted out the basic skills of product person, and may even have changed jobs or been promoted to product manager, but the reality is that product staff still need to combine the trend of the company and the understanding of the Internet

Here I have listed the status of several product people:

• The company has the Internet architecture, but the leadership level does not have the product big V

• The company has no Internet architecture, and the leadership level has no big V products

• The company has Internet architecture, and the leadership level has big V products

• The company has no Internet architecture, and the leadership level has big V products

The above four situations are the common ones summarized by my friends and my own product work experience. However, there are more situations in reality, such as the company’s capital chain and the company’s public sentiment is not consistent, etc. What I have listed are relatively routine situations.

At this point, as a product manager, you need to first understand the current situation of the company and department.

When product managers argue with their leaders about product requirements, they will often say: “The leader does not understand products at all and has no Internet thinking.”

Most of the reasons for this are that, for example, the product director of some companies is led by some business people or technical people.

But I’m not going to talk about appeals here either, because this kind of product-thinking judgment is not easy for readers to understand

Ok, let’s go back and look at the current job of product manager. Here I have listed the following:

[Product Manager’s Job List]

Above is my product manager job list in my product progression. Maybe your current job is more than that, so don’t worry, just check to see if there are any of the usual items listed above.

Product managers tend to be more product-driven than product assistants. The driving tendency is as follows:

Be responsible for your own modules.

After receiving the task or requirement, control the requirement during the module design time and development time. In addition, the data after the launch of the product shall be collected, and the corresponding requirements shall be recorded and sorted out in a timely manner, and the important requirements or product problems shall be dealt with or designed in a priority manner, so as to ensure that the corresponding functions are solved or added in the next version.

User survey is also commonly used by product managers to master product user portraits. Through questionnaires, offline interviews and other forms, representative user portraits in products are sorted out.

Especially in the work of product manager, product review of a PK conference of product manager, if you are now actively preparing for the review conference, you are facing the unified PK of development, UI and BOSS, can you successfully land your product functions or corresponding requirements, in this huge quarrel meeting, The product manager will prepare relevant data or sufficient reasons to convince most of the people present and even everyone.

Let’s go back to the four product teams mentioned below

The four product team scenarios listed above are intended for those from product assistant to product manager. If you work as a product assistant, you don’t have to worry about your current team or company status, as long as you’re doing something and getting paid. But if you’re a product manager, you need to understand that what you’re doing right now is getting ready for phase one!

Therefore, of the four scenarios I mentioned above, the third must be your preferred choice.

If your current team is the second type, consider looking for a better team or environment.

If you’re in a third or fourth type of team, you might want to move on. In the case of a company with an Internet architecture, at least your skills are to meet the requirements of the next stage, your work is product-centric work.

If the fourth type needs to pay attention to whether the LEADER will stay for a long time, the team or company in this situation, the products of the senior management are easy to leave, the specific reasons will be described below.

Salary: 8K-15K (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen)

Senior Product Manager

After nearly 4 years of product work. Senior product managers are not so unreachable to product people. When I see the sharing of product friends in moments or the admiration or even envy of senior product managers from product friends in wechat groups, in fact, I think the core differences between senior product managers and product managers are as follows:

Strategy and Execution

Here are some rules I think senior product managers should follow

Senior Product Manager

Product managers and senior product manager emphasis lies in the execution and strategy, and here I am at present I am in charge of the UGC community for the function module is user UGC in the entire product, there are two module involves the user content output, although the current demand is in view of the current community iteration, but also as a content output function module B, I will consider how to associate or connect two user operation modules A/B.

The above is about the awareness of senior product managers, that is, the awareness of the overall framework of products and the strategic positioning of products, whether users’ needs can be combined with the framework and positioning of products.

Senior product managers, compared with product managers, have done the same module repeatedly, and the rules or algorithms of the corresponding module can quickly provide a set of feasible solutions. Moreover, compared with modules made by product managers, their modules have higher standards or market recognition due to experience.

And the ability to integrate resources within the company and concentrate resources to build products.

Recommended salary: 12-20K (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen)

Director of product

At present, product director is my job responsibility, which is certainly not my ultimate goal in life. Because ultimately, product people need to build a good product. Having users, daily activity and revenue is a good performance of a product director. As for the distinction between product director and senior product manager, in fact, in the current product industry, the distinction is relatively fuzzy.

As far as I know, in some companies, senior product manager +CTO is the whole product department, but in some companies, product director + senior product manager is the product leadership.

That is to say, in some companies, the senior product manager may be the product director on the title, and the product director may be the senior product manager.

This depends on whether the department is complete or not, that is, whether there is a complete Internet architecture in the four categories I mentioned above.

Product director, I think, needs more strategic ability. According to the product director I know, the product ability is not so important, but the ability to control the trend of the product.

It takes leadership or charisma to convince a company or lead a team to do it.

But here please note that the product director is absolutely impossible to do not understand the product, but in reality there is a little do not understand the product when the product director, and can also do a good product.

Therefore, the source of product director is not so single, I think the product director can come from

1. Senior Product Manager

2. The sales staff

3. management

Of course, we are engaged in the product profession, and most students aim to be in the first category. But in reality, due to the development of the company, it is impossible to find such a person or the company is not willing to spend money to find such a person, and the product director may be the other two situations above

But I always believe that no matter where the product director comes from, the director from the product background, his products go far to go for a long time.

Why do you say so? Because I think it is precisely because of the background of the product personnel, he knows the market demand, the demand of users, the abnormal products may happen, there is no doubt that he will fight a prepared war!

Salary Suggestion: 30-100W/ year (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu)

Ok, today’s sharing is here, I will insist on two original articles every week

In addition, my first book “From Zero to One: PM changes the World” was officially launched as an electronic file. This book summarizes 222 original products, covering the content of product manager interview, algorithm, interaction and other different dimensions. If you are interested, you can reward and leave a message on your email. I will send an email to you around 12:00 noon every day (hope you do not spread support, support copyright). If you need to preview the book outline, jump to the link

A book for yourself and product people: from zero to one