Watch Part Four of our new video series, where our Senior Product Management recruiter, Heidi Ram, shares the trends she’s seeing in Product Manager salaries.If you are looking to build out your Product team (or retain the great talent you already have), this series will be a valuable resource for your compensation discussions. If you missed them, watch the Introduction, Part One, and Part Two, and Part Three.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Well we’re now at that point where we’re talking about everyone else’s base salaries. Those hard to believe ones that sort of start at the $130K mark and go as high as $165K. Who are these people? How are they in these situations where they’re earning that kind of a base salary for being an individual contributing Product Manager?
Well again, all situations have explanations and reasons, there’s a lot of grey area everywhere.
But from my personal experience recruiting folks who I discover are earning these kinds of salaries, there are some commonalities.
And this is what it looks like.
So often times, these folks are not working on native mobile apps, or even B2B SaaS platforms.
These are the people who are working on hard, large, hard core large backend infrastructure systems. Those backend systems that everything else is built on, that keep companies operating. And those companies are global. These folks are responsible for products that are used globally in very complex environments. And these folks have often been with these firms for quite a while.
These folks are not often the ones who are making quick and rapid frequent changes. Sometimes these folks are, and I am thinking of one individual in particular, individual contributing Product Manager making $165K, it might even be that this person is making $170K but here is their situation: they worked for a Canadian technology company who got acquired, and then the acquiring company over time really didn’t invest in that product and it sort of, it’s been in maintenance mode, but you know what, the revenue is being generated by that product for something like $70, $80, $90 million dollars globally. There’s customers counting on that thing being operational, and so this person is responsible for that. And he is paid a lot of money to keep the lights on and to keep it going. Alright.
Yes this individual knows that he is not growing his Product Management skills. This person knows that he’s working on something that is in maintenance mode and kind of legacy, but you know what, at that salary he is ok with it! And maybe you and I might be too. So that’s that situation.
So there’s lots of unique situations in the market place which, you know when you scratch the surface, it’s understandable why.
Alright. I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions about this or anything related to salaries and Product Management, if you want to dig deeper and talk about your organization specifically and how you should be looking at your salaries to retain or to attract talent, anyone in our firm, myself would love to have a conversation with you about that. Heidi@mbassett.com
We hope this has been helpful, until the next time.
Are you getting ready to hire a Product Manager? We’ve created a free checklist to help you refine your requirements, plan the interview process, and get aligned on competitive compensation.