The product economy is increasing the need for Product Managers

Scarcely a moment of your life now passes without the use of some kind of product that gathers and transmits enormous amounts of data. These products surround us both at home and at work, powering everything from a drive to the doctor’s office to a sales conference with colleagues. In short, we now live in the product economy.

The product economy: A complex world

We interact with an increasing amount of interconnected products every day, even if we don’t notice it. This trend affects us at home, in the office, and even when jogging or driving out.

Picture this: The smartwatch on your wrist tracks your pulse as you jog around the block before hopping into your internet-connected car and driving to the office. Soon, this car may be self-driving, taking map data from your smartphone to navigate you on the most efficient route back home at the end of the day. And when you’re five minutes from your drive away, your phone may instruct your smart home to automatically turn on the air-conditioning, disable the burglar alarm and perhaps even preheat the oven so it’s ready for whatever’s on the menu for dinner.

At work, the emails you caught up with last night are automatically up to date on your office computer. But that’s just the start; you find it natural that your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integrates with your accounting software, making it easy to track and record sales. Your various analytics apps feed information across to different departments, allowing your marketing team to emphasize features that customers most cherish and your tech support team to quickly identify and fix possible bugs.

This interconnectivity trend will only increase

There are approximately 20.4 billion objects currently online in the IoT. By 2025, this number is estimated to be 75 billion. Not only will the IoT grow threefold over the next five years, but the corporate reliance on Software as a Service (SaaS) to power their operations is also predicted to grow tremendously. Today, a mere 2% of UK businesses are not on the cloud. SaaS growth will continue at 18% per year, with the global SaaS workload expected to reach 380 million by next year, at which point Cisco expects 94% of workloads to operate in the cloud.

Everything is now online, and everything is connected. And with this interconnectedness comes a great deal of complexity, which needs to be properly managed. Enter the Product Manager.

Demand for Product Managers has never been higher

When virtually every device in your home and work life also functions as a digital product, it’s hardly surprising that Product Managers are in greater demand than ever before. Writing about the incredible growth in demand in a LinkedIn article, Product Manager Neal Iyer shows that between August 2017 and June 2019, demand for Product Manager roles in the U.S. grew by an astronomical 32%.

The lesson is simple and intuitive: When everything is a product, then every company needs a Product Manager.