All About the Product Manager Specialty: Why Companies Need Them and How They Help in the Development of IT Technologies

Recently, we held a live stream with Bakhytzhan Zhakazhanov, CEO and founder of ProductBee, and Senior Product Manager at MyCar. He shared his experience in this field and the main responsibilities of product managers. We are sharing the key points with you in text format.

Bakhytzhan Zhakazhanov, CEO and founder of ProductBee, Senior Product Manager at MyCar

About myself
In 2017, I graduated from Nazarbayev University with a degree in Economics. I also studied as a data researcher at the University of California, San Diego, through the Bolashak program.
I am a Product Manager at MyCar, where I am responsible for the company's app. I also lead the Product Bee project, where we train product managers and other IT specialists.

About responsibilities
Responsibilities depend on the company you work for. There are large corporations where all processes are already established, such as Beeline or Kaspi. In these companies, there is a good segregation of roles—clear division of responsibilities. Each specific detail is the responsibility of a particular employee.
In smaller organizations, work is not as streamlined: there are no divisions or chapters, so product managers handle various tasks: UX research, conducting surveys, and so on, up to managing analytics.

Product managers can be divided into "portraits":
— marketer: knows how to bring users to the app
— technical PM: explains tasks well to developers, writes technical specifications
— UX researcher: gets to know the users
— people manager: assists with HR, manages the team.

Additionally, the manager's role depends on the stage of the company's development. American researchers identify four types:
— 0 to 1: building an MVP
— scale: implementing analytics, performance marketing
— mature: supporting MRR
— declining companies: crisis management.

Demand
Abroad, there is a need for data skills: knowledge of statistics, SQL, and the ability to logically explain actions. In Kazakhstan, such demand does not yet exist. Here, a product manager must be reasonable and able to solve problems.

Another difference in foreign companies is that they do not hire "product managers" separately. Employees become them on their own, because they know the product best from the inside.

The Product Manager specialty will be in demand in the future. Many companies do not know about it but hire employees with similar responsibilities, just under a different title: project managers, assistants, and so on.
At the same time, product managers are less in demand than developers. In a team, there is usually one specialist in my profession for every ten programmers.

Difference between Product and Project Manager

There are two main stages in product creation:

1. Discovery — market and customer research before creation
2. Delivery — the process after defining the hypothesis and development.

A Project Manager is responsible only for delivery, meaning they are not involved in the analysis process. They receive the task of creating the project. Their goal is to complete the work within the deadline and budget.
A Product Manager is responsible for both parts. They generate hypotheses, test them, and monitor the product's lifecycle.

How to become a product manager
Product Manager is a mature position where it is difficult to work without an IT background. The specialist must assign tasks to experienced developers and negotiate with stakeholders. A student or beginner can easily get lost. The profession suits those who have experience and skills in related fields. The specialist also needs soft skills, in particular, the ability to sell the product to stakeholders and clients.

A product manager should have two types of knowledge:
— technical
— domain: in finance, medicine, education, and other fields. They are valued abroad — foreign companies want to know that you are already a professional in a specific area and can help with that part.

To become a product manager, you need to get an internship at an IT company, preferably in the position of a systems analyst, and then grow in this direction.

I recommend the ProductDo courses — here you will be explained complex technical things that will be useful in work.
Google Practice significantly improves analytics and gives you credibility when going through an interview.
There are good free resources on YouTube from karpov.courses, VK Team.

For employment, it is necessary to create quality professional networking. About 80-90% of good positions are filled through acquaintances. Open vacancies on LinkedIn or HeadHunter are published after companies fail to find an employee internally. Many people with good resumes apply here, so competition is higher. Therefore, you need to attend events, make useful connections, and be active.