The Product Manager is a visionary.
Based on company objectives, business trends and technological developments the product manager creates the vision, that describes where the product, product group or business unit should be in three to five years time. That implies that the product manager will be a great source for requirements, but also should provide detailed specifications for the projects to ensure these medium to long term plans can be met.
We offer a complete program, which learns the product manager how to create requirements and track them throughout the entire development process and what is expected in an Agile organization.
In general a product manager should be able to:
- understand and anticipate to technical and market trends
- transform a vision into reality
- set priorities
- feed the product development teams
The level of in depth knowledge of requirements engineering and agile is dependent on how the product manager role has been implemented at your organization. Usually the requirements engineering or business analysis tasks are done by someone else. A product manager is supposed to have equally balanced business and technical analysis skills, to make sure that the most important requirements are understood correctly by the business analysts or requirements engineers. This requires the product manager to master the requirements engineering skills as part of his total skill set. We recommend to start with our Requirements Engineering Foundations course.
If the Product Manager is actively participating as a product owner in a Scrum team, he needs to understand the dynamics, roles, artifacts and events of Scrum. Certification is probably not necessary. A solid Introduction to Scrum should sufficient.