Product Marketing Manager

According to Glassdoor, the average salary for a product marketing manager is more than $113,000 (before signing, performance, and stock bonuses). But why shoot for an average salary when you can earn a significantly higher salary at high-profile tech companies, start-ups, and Fortune 500 businesses? Silicon Valley veteran product marketing manager Dekker Fraser offers proven and powerful real-world career advice in the lucrative and exciting product marketing career arena.

If you're looking for an effective and proven approach to product management - one that recognizes that the majority of product managers enter the field with little or no training and must learn through trial and error - this is the book for you. Take Charge Product Management guides you step-by-step along the product management path with tips, tactics, and tools to make you and your products more successful.

At the heart of what it means to be a product manager lies the ability to market your product. No matter if you are trying to get people inside of your company to provide you with the resources or funding that your product needs in order to get out the door or if it's customers that you are after, you've got to be able to paint a picture of your product that makes people want it.

In the end, it all comes down to what your customer wants to tell you about your product. However, how many of us have been taught how to listen to our customers?

The job of a product manager is made even more difficult by the simple fact that it really does not come with any clear instructions on how to do it correctly. As product managers we are constantly searching for ways to become better. One of the things that every product manager quickly realizes is that their career success is very closely tied to the financial success of their product.

Dr. Jim Anderson explores what product managers have to do in order to make their products a success. Dr. Anderson uses real-world examples from Microsoft, Dell, and Toyota to show product managers both what works and what doesn't work when it comes to capturing your customer's imagination (and their wallets). Product managers can get caught up in the details of their product. There always seem to be new requirements to create, product launches to schedule, and features to document.

Product failures are never something that a product manager wants to talk about. We all live with the secret dread that someday the product that we are responsible for might turn out to be a failure. It turns out that we're all missing an important learning opportunity. Products do fail, and they end up failing for a wide range of reasons. Every product failure is loaded with fantastic learning opportunities for product managers. We just need to take the time and open our eyes to see what we can learn from each failure.

When you became a product manager, did anyone take the time to mention to you that you were signing up to become a member of your company's sales department? You might have thought that you were joining the marketing department, but if your product doesn't sell, then you won't be holding on to your product management job for long!

What is a product manager without a product? Nothing. That's why it's so very important that when a product is being developed that the product manager be involved. Now exactly how best to go about doing that is an entirely different question. The process from having an idea for a product to actually having a product is a long and treacherous road. So many things can go wrong that either cause the schedule to have to be extended or cause a product with the wrong features to be developed.

Do product managers have super powers? Probably not, but there are some product managers who seem to be more successful than others. These "super" product managers seem to be able to make things happen almost effortlessly. What's their secret?

Who was it that said "It takes a village…"? They may not have been talking about being a product manager, but they might as well have been. Life has become so complex that product managers can no longer make their product a success just by their own efforts. Today it takes the help of one or more partners to get your product to where it needs to be. Are you going to be ready to work with those partners?

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best.

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is. The more units that get sold to customers who have decided that your product is what they really need, the better job you have done in creating a solution to your customer's problems.

This audiobook has been written with one goal in mind - to show you how you can make your product management career a success. It's not easy being a product manager so we're going to show you what you need to be doing in order to make you stand out and be successful! Let's make your career a success!