Group product managers manage a product team accountable for a group of products. Hence professionals in the product industry call this a player/coach role. Whether you are a senior product manager or a novice wishing to embark on a career in a group product manager position, this article describes the job description examples compiled from various reliable sources that you have to confront.
So before divining into these examples, let’s take a closer look at the product management skills and responsibilities you require.
What are the Group Product Manager’s Responsibilities?
This role is available in large-scale organizations with multiple products in numerous stages of a product development cycle. Thus a group product manager is responsible for managing products as a group rather than individual product management.
These management tasks include identifying customer needs, scoping, and ensuring that the company delivers a high-quality product. In the process, they create business requirement documents and conduct surveys with users and stakeholders of a product.
Furthermore, they handle product improvements and manage all the product development life cycle phases from beginning to end.
So to execute these responsibilities, a group product manager needs to have a set of unique skills for the role. Let’s look at these skills briefly.
What are the Required Group Product Manager Skills?
managing both people and products is a critical skill for a group product manager. Product managers demonstrate inspiring and effective leadership instead of acting as bosses by being authoritative. Along with it, they require handling and prioritizing multiple contending requests.
Group product managers need to understand their target market deeply to produce high-quality products. To accomplish it, you have to include the customer’s requirements as a top priority in the product roadmap. Other skills for most group product managers include communication skills and sharp product analytical skills.
Group product management requires you to have knowledge and experience in the industry that you’re working for.
Regarding educational qualifications, most organizations ask for a Bachelor’s degree in business management, marketing, finance, or relevant business domain of your work industry.
Now you have a clear picture of the skills and responsibilities a group product manager needs. So it’s time to dive deeper into job description examples in various industries. You have the choice to make modifications as you wish.
Job Description of Group Product Manager, Example 1 – Accounting/Bookkeeping
Job Description
We’re a multinational company providing accounting and bookkeeping services to clients across the country. We’re looking for a competent product manager to carry our vision forward for our products and services portfolio.
As a group product manager, your responsibilities include:
- Understand customer requirements and build the product roadmap by identifying the product vision.
- Develop product strategy and work with product marketing to help them comprehend product features.
- Execute research to discover the needs and wants of the customers.
- Provide leadership to your peers in the group product management team and work closely with the associate product manager, product architects, sales, marketing, and engineering teams to ensure you meet customer goals and business cases.
- Execute product improvements based on customer feedback and particular group members.
- Mentor and guide novice members of the product management team and the other team members who report to you.
- Cultivate a work-hard and play-hard work environment that breaths our company’s core values.
- Suggest process improvements to the director of product to whom you report to.
- Measure KPIs during product launches and when monitoring performance.
- Follow the industry best practices to ensure to meet the customer goals.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Bussiness Management, Accounting, or related field.
- We prefer a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) but not essential.
- It’s nice to have an agile certified product manager and product owner certification.
Required Experience and Skills
- As group product managers work with a group of products ability to learn about our products quickly is an utmost requirement.
- You need to understand the business domain and the technology industry as you frequently work with tech gadgets and software products.
- 1 to 2 years of experience managing people and products with some project management experience.
- 3+ years of experience in product management.
- Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, as you must communicate regularly with stakeholders, product owners, and different departments within the organization.
- Possess a higher level of enthusiasm to enhance skills and experience among junior team members.
Job Description of Group Product Manager, Example 2 – IT/Web Hosting
Job Description
A leading web hosting company is on the lookout for a group product manager to manage people consisting of product stakeholders, product managers, and day-to-day activities to ensure the delivery of a high-quality final product in the Agile environment. Hence your key responsibilities include managing people, defining business goals, and reporting to senior management on the below tasks.
Your Individual Contribution Responsibilities
- Collaborate with product teams to deliver a quality product with minimal errors.
- Steepen the product team’s learning curve by helping them to identify the latest market trends and providing tips and suggestions to improve their product knowledge.
- Manage and promote two-way communication between the product team’s plans and the senior leadership’s strategic product direction effectively to accomplish the product’s goals.
- Execute strategic initiatives by collaborating with other product management teams and senior management.
- Perform market competitor analysis to monitor competitor performance.
- Monitor product team performance using the latest industry-standard tools.
- Ensure the marketing team has prepared product brochures, leaflets, and other communication materials for a smooth product launch.
- Supervise the product team to ensure they create quality products within budget and time constraints.
- Adhere to the company’s rules and procedures.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Software Development, Information Technology, or Business Information Systems.
- Postgraduate qualification such as an MBA.
- Familiarity and experience in working with all the phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) with experience working in Agile methodology.
- Three or more years of experience in managing product development teams.
- Two or more years of experience in people management skills for small to medium-scale software teams.
Skills and Experience
- Outstanding communication and presentation skills: This role requires you to present to various levels of management in internal departments; thus, you need to have a unique presentation style to suit each group. Furthermore, to converse effectively within internal and external teams, this role requires you to have exceptional communication skills.
- Outstanding time management skills: You need to be at your best to manage time as there are a higher degree of people and physical resources to prioritize and set goals, timelines, and objectives to achieve the optimum level of productivity.
- Adaptability: You need to adapt to sudden changes in client, stakeholder, and manager requirements.
- Planning and organizing skills: You need exceptional organizational skills as this is a challenging environment to be part of. Any lapse in planning or organization leads to the inability to cope with the workload.
- Technical skills: Familiarity with product lifecycle, knowledge, and experience in Agile frameworks such as Scrum. Also, a piece of knowledge on hosting web content is a bonus skill to have.
Leadership Skills
- Appreciate and show empathy towards the people you manage when required.
- Follow both internal and external communication promptly.
- Earn the confidence of the managing teams by understanding their needs, listening, and taking action for their needs and concerns when needed.
Job Description of Group Product Manager, Example 3 – Google Cloud Product Manager
This is a fantastic opportunity for the group product manager in a world-class tech company to reap the rewards with plenty of benefits. In this remote role, working for Google Cloud you’re responsible for working with cross-functional teams to guide the creation of products from the requirement-gathering phase to product launch.
In doing so, one of your primary roles is to bridge the gap between the technical and the business world. Your role also includes working closely with marketing, product, engineering, designers, and software developers to assist in creating products that enable access to data worldwide.
As a technical/domain expert, your key responsibilities lie in controlling the associated solutions, the external roadmap of the product, and competitive differences. Below is a brief overview of your tasks as a group product manager:
- Perform research beyond the standard market to anticipate the latest trends in the market and where the future lies.
- Partner closely with other members, such as marketing and product management, to develop and create go-to-market strategies that promote company success and product adoption.
- Focus on creating presentations and demos for potential customers.
- Be accountable for all the tasks with go-to-market coordination.
- Identify the technology-driven strategies for customers’ and partners’ success and enhance operational efficiency.
- Collaborate with the engineering, sales, marketing, and product teams to support the growth of partners’ and customers’ companies.
- Provide solutions for the client and promote alignment across product management, engineering, and product marketing activities.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Business Analysis, Marketing, Management, or related discipline.
- Over seven years of experience in product management or similar technical product roles.
- Five years of experience building tech products based on industry best standards and practices.
- Understanding of marketing tech items to the market.
Preferred/Bonus Qualifications
- A Ph.D. or Master’s degree in a discipline connected to business or technology.
- Ability to communicate and collaborate with cross-functional teams and influence multiple stakeholders without authority.
- Five or more years of experience in people management, including technical leadership.
- Ability to work in major technical domain areas in API administration, big data, computations, infrastructure, or developer operations.
- Experience working in a hyper-growth or entrepreneurial environment where you have created products from scratch.
- Ability to convert commercial business models into technological solutions.
Job Description of Group Product Manager, Example 4 – Solar Energy
We’re a leading global supplier of solar energy to various enterprises and residences. Our product group plays a significant role in creating the company’s strategic vision and building new solutions.
We’re looking for an experienced and innovative group product manager with hands-on experience to lead multiple product teams. Furthermore, the candidate is responsible for delivering thorough end-to-end research of products, gathering requirements, and developing a product strategy.
In addition to leading our product teams, we need you to supervise product readiness and function with various stakeholders and departments, including marketing, operations, integrations, support, and engineering.
Major Responsibilities
- Interact and engage with customers
- Define the product requirements and what is the final product that stakeholders expect.
- Organize, liaise, and lead several teams to meet the objectives and specifications of projects.
- Act as the primary contact point for queries relevant to products.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or relevant field
- MBA is not mandatory, but it’s an advantage.
- Ability to take responsibility
- Capacity for multitasking and managing several duties in a fast-paced environment