Each year Pragmatic Marketing conducts a survey of product managers and marketing professionals. Our objective is to provide you with information about compensation as well as the most common responsibilities for product managers and other marketing professionals.

The survey was mailed to 5000 marketing professionals with 981 responses.

The survey was conducted during the period of November 11-25, 2002 using WebSurveyor.

Profile of a product manager

The average Product Manager is 35 years old;
84% claim to be "somewhat" or "very" technical;
92% have completed college, 51% have some MBA classes,
and 40% have completed a masters program;
35% are female, 65% are male.

The typical product manager has responsibility for three products.

Organization

The typical product manager reports to a director in the marketing department.

• 49% report to a director
• 28% to VP
  
• 27% are in the marketing department
• 15% report to the CEO
• 10% are in the Product Management department
• 10% are in Development or Engineering
• 7% are in a sales department

Impacts on Productivity

Product managers receive 63 emails a day and send about 30.

On average, product managers attend 12 internal meetings each week.
But 38% are going to 15 meetings or more each week and 20% attend more than 20 meetings!

Working with requirements

The majority of product managers are researching market needs, writing requirements, and monitoring development projects.

• 69% researching market needs
• 55% preparing business case
• 77% writing requirements
• 48% writing specifications
• 86% monitoring development projects

Working with marcom and sales

Product managers still spend a lot of time providing technical content for marcom and sales.

• 57% writing promotional copy
• 49% proofing promotional communications
• 58% training sales people
• 47% going on sales calls
• 23% performing win/loss analysis

Compensation

Average product management compensation is
$88,496 salary
plus $8,092 annual bonus
(78% of product managers get a bonus)

• Females
  $84,663 base salary
  plus $7,548 bonus
• Males
  $90,685 base salary
  plus $8.418 bonus
  (All amounts in $US)

Our bonuses are based on:

• 59% company profit
• 27% product revenue
• 40% quarterly objectives (MBOs)

More than 40% say the bonus does not motivate at all and only 11% say the bonus motivates a lot.

Regional impact on compensation

Comments for the VP of Sales

Product managers offered this feedback to the VP of sales:

• Product management is not sales support
• Give us access to customers and customer information
• Let product management manage the products
  (ie., quit interfering).
• Stop the rampant discounting
• Sell what we have (and stop selling product futures)
• Read what we publish

Read all the comments

Product Management ratios within the company

How are product managers allocated relative to other departments?

For each Product Manager (PM), we find:

• 2.7 Products
• 0.7 Product Lines
• 1.0 Services
• 13.3 Developers
• 1.7 Development Leads
• 1.7 Sales Engineers/Pre-sales support
• 5.0 Sales people

For companies with both product managers and product marketing managers, the average is 3.82 product managers and 2.63 product marketing managers for 13.84 products.

Product management technology environment

Product managers use a fairly standard computing setup, usually a laptop running Office XP, with these operating system characteristics:

• Windows 2000 Professional (50%) or Windows XP (25%)
• Internet Explorer 6.x (94%)
• 1024 x 768 screen resolution (65%) or better
• 16-bit color or better (98%); 32-bit color (50%)
• Java with cookies enabled (95%)
• Plug ins installed
  • Shockwave Flash (95%)
  • Adobe Acrobat [PDF] (70%)
  • Real Player (50%)
  • Quicktime (20%)