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

50 product management and marketing professionals responded to the survey from Ontario and British Columbia. 74% of the companies are based in Canada; 18% in the US, and the rest in UK or Europe.

The survey was conducted during the period of March 1-8, 2005 using WebSurveyor.

Profile of a product manager in Canada

The average Product Manager is 35 years old;
94% claim to be "somewhat" or "very" technical;
85% have completed college, 39% have some MBA classes,
and 32% have completed a masters program;
15% are female, 85% are male.

The typical product manager has responsibility for three products.

Organization

• 47% report to a director
• 35% to VP
• 30% report directly to the CEO
• 30% are in either Marketing or Sales & Marketing
• 20% are in the Product Management department
• 9% are in Development or Engineering

Impacts on Productivity

Product managers receive 55 emails a day and send about 25.

Product managers spend roughly two days a week in internal meetings (12 meetings/week).
But 49% are going to 15 meetings or more each week, and 24% attend 19 or more meetings!

Working with requirements

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

• 68% researching market needs
• 51% preparing business case
• 23% performing win/loss analysis
  
• 80% monitoring development projects
• 79% writing requirements
• 48% writing specifications

Working with marketing communications and sales

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

• 57% writing promotional copy

• 48% approving promotional materials

• 18% working with press and analysts
  

• 53% training sales people

• 55% going on sales calls

Compensation

Average product management compensation (in Canadian $) is
$94,510 salary
plus $12,130 annual bonus
(84% of product managers get a bonus)

Our bonuses are based on:

• 49% company profit
• 26% product revenue
• 37% quarterly objectives (MBOs)

Over 37% say the bonus does not motivate at all and only 5% say the bonus motivates a lot.

Regional impact on compensation

⁽¹⁾ compensation only calculated when survey received 7 or more responses

Product Management ratios within the company

How are product managers allocated relative to other departments?

For each Product Manager (PM), we find:

• 3.5 Products
• 1.11 development leads or managers
• 10.00 developers
• 0.67 product architects
• 0.35 user interaction designers (fewer than 50% of companies have any UI designers)
• 2.67 sales people
• 1.11 sales engineers/pre-sales support (2.4 per sales person)