The Core Duties & Advantages Of A Product Manager

“Did you know that in a survey conducted by The Product Manager, approximately 700,000 professionals are working as full-time and part-time Product Managers, and these numbers are only growing by the day? “

With the advent of the pandemic, remote working has catered to many professional opportunities. Remote working as a choice has rapidly grown in a previous couple of years, and freelancing has become a preferable norm for individuals. It allows them to work according to their timeline and balance the notion of work-life management. 

Freelance product management is certainly a new field that has shown its merits and demerits in the industry with the inclusion of multifaceted companies. According to Glassdoor’s recent survey, a freelance product manager earns approximately $ 108,992 annually.

Product management combines user focus, business savvy, and tech expertise to create strong product outcomes, a varied and dynamic field that significantly impacts organizations and their stakeholders. Additionally, product managers work as an anchor between the company’s marketing scenario while working on the back-end as the product supervisor.

It is a new field and frowned upon by many companies due to their requirements of keeping the manager on the ground. But at the same time, most of the duties of product managers can be handled while working remotely. 

Core Duties Of A Product Manager

Some of the core duties that a Product Manager can take up while working remotely are:-

1. Design Activities 

According to McKinsey, almost 80% of product managers work on the design activities of the product. Design activities involve collaborating with technical and design functions, product outlets, and inlet and design aesthetics. 

All the tasks mentioned above can be remotely handled via various social media tools, with the growth of new applications by the hour. 

2. Product Strategy 

Research by Medium mentions that approximately 60% of product managers cater to the role of product strategy. Product strategy requires market-based knowledge and research perspective to create a thorough roadmap. The process is handled with the help of product management software such as Zeda.io, Zoho, Freshflows, and Asana, which can be done from anywhere across the globe. 

In the increasingly digital product management environment, tools are essential in facilitating remote work and enhancing productivity. By leveraging an online scrum board, freelance product managers can efficiently manage their teams and projects, ensuring tasks are visible and progress is transparent to all stakeholders.

3. Leading A Team 

It is a prominent role that product managers lead the marketing, analytics, inventory, and many more branches of product development process. With the same, an essential part and duty of a product manager are to create a space for leadership and growth within the teams. 

Product Management activities are situated at the intersection of the strategy and the execution. Along with coming up with the ideas to solve the problems and convincing stakeholders to build those features, product managers have to get the job done and deliver. product managers need to lead the team through people leadership, communication and transparency, thought leadership, and results-oriented culture to witness the successful completion of projects. Product managers also focus on product prioritization, ensuring that the team works on the most important projects first to deliver value efficiently. With digitized forms of meetings, product managers have led comprehensive growth strategies for product developments within the teams. In this matter, project managers can use the SharePoint kanban board that will help them to analyze the progress of any projects.

Advantages Of Being A Freelance Product Manager 

1. They can pick up the pieces (even in the middle of development)

Sometimes it can seem like a project is too far gone. When companies are in the thick of it, the product fog can damper the goals and plans, destroy the corporate budget, and annihilate clients’ faith. However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Whatever mistake is made can always be mended. Often, it just takes a bit of cunning, wit, and determination. No fear — a great freelance product manager supplies the corporates with all that. They can be onboarded in the middle of a project without disrupting development and start work immediately. They also use project management tools to seamlessly integrate into existing workflows and ensure everything runs smoothly.

2. They can gather critical business intelligence

A product manager freelancer can come in as an outsider and provide much-needed perspective to your project. They can provide new resources. They leverage agile, lean, and Scrum principles to develop tweaked product plans, team assignments, and communication channels and protocols. In addition to this, freelance product managers should clearly understand Microservices to gain benefits from this approach.

3. Companies can hire Product Managers quickly and efficiently

Time is of the essence when product development is becoming a product nightmare. Thankfully, companies can hire freelance product managers and consultants quickly without breaking the bank.

Check out the time management tips for a freelancer.

Freelance product managers can act as highly cost-effective consultants, saving your company money and precious time.

When you begin your search for product managers, you may be surprised that some freelance marketplaces guarantee vetted matches within a week or even a few days. When compared to the traditional hiring process, this is lightning fast.

4. Freelancers bring experience and perspective

Freelance product managers have typically seen every type of working environment for the product cycle and can tell what goes wrong, when, and where. Freelance product managers are essentially at home in the middle of a crisis. When hired, their solution is to make a product roadmap quickly to organize teams.

They are great at creating quick assessments and faster solutions. They know which parts of the development are slow and which could be more cost-efficient—all the while figuring out how to patch the boat without letting it sink.

Their manifold experiences and innate perspective are a godsend for teams mired in traditional thinking or organizational echo chambers.

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Conclusion

Product Managers are the project savers who manage crises. Working as a freelancer, they also have a unique work history that gives them distinctive and individual insights into how certain products work and are able to handle the production in a better manner. 

Many of the benefits of freelance product managers revolve around their ability to rally the forces and create a cohesive and communicative team. Freelance product managers can also leverage their knowledge of managerial methods to create several special groups or transition certain employees to develop a coherent and harmonious product development team. This results in the creation of a clear timeline and the product vision.

Looking to become a UX designer and start your career off on the right foot? Our blog has got you covered with all the information you need to get started!

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