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.

500 product management and marketing professionals responded to the survey.

The survey was conducted during the period of November 8-18, 2004 using WebSurveyor.

Profile of a product manager

The average Product Manager is 36 years old;
85% claim to be "somewhat" or "very" technical;
90% have completed college, 49% have some MBA classes,
and 38% have completed a masters program;
25% are female, 75% are male.

The typical product manager has responsibility for three products.

Organization

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

• 45% report to a director
• 32% to VP
  
• 23% report directly to the CEO
• 25% are in the Marketing department
• 17% are in the Product Management department
• 13% are in Development or Engineering
• 8% are in a sales department

Impacts on Productivity

Product managers receive 60 emails a day and send about 28.

Product managers spend roughly two days a week in internal meetings (14 meetings/week).
But 48% are going to 15 meetings or more each week, and 29% attend 19 or more meetings!

Working with requirements

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

• 70% researching market needs
• 58% preparing business case
• 23% performing win/loss analysis
  
• 81% monitoring development projects
• 83% writing requirements
• 53% writing specifications

Working with marketing communications and sales

Product managers also spend time providing technical content for marcom and sales.

• 48% writing promotional copy
• 40% approving promotional materials
• 18% working with press and analysts
  
• 56% training sales people
• 45% going on sales calls

Compensation

Average US product management compensation is
$90,545 salary
plus $11,810 annual bonus
(78% of product managers get a bonus)

Our bonuses are based on:

• 60% company profit
• 30% product revenue
• 38% quarterly objectives (MBOs)

Almost 35% say the bonus does not motivate at all and only 9% say the bonus motivates a lot.

Regional impact on compensation

⁽¹⁾ Northeast (CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT)
Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI)
South (AL, FL, GA, KY, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
Southwest (AR, LA, OK, TX)
West (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, NV, UT, WY)
Pacific (Alaska. CA, Hawaii, OR, WA)

• Average, Minimums, Maximums, and Counts
• Canadian profiles and responses

Product Management ratios within the company

How are product managers allocated relative to other departments?

For each Product Manager (PM), we find:

• 3.0 Products
• 6.5 Developers
• 0.9 Development Leads
• 0.9 Product architects
• 4.7 Sales people
• 1.9 Sales Engineers/Pre-sales support (2.5 sales people per SE)

Product management technology environment

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

• Windows XP (64%) or Windows 2000 Professional (26%)
  • [Windows 98 (5%) and Macintosh (2%)]
• Internet Explorer (93%) [Note: Firefox represented 7.5% in 4Q04]
• 1024 x 768 screen resolution or better (85%)
• Java with cookies enabled (96%)
• Plug ins installed
  • Shockwave Flash (98%)
  • Java plug-in (83%)
  • Adobe Acrobat [PDF] (78%)