Advancing Software Product Management Education: Insights from an Industry Survey

Software product managers have become critical to a software product's success. They act as a liaison among various stakeholders - software engineers, management, and customers - to ensure a product meets customer needs. Despite the role's rise in popularity, research and related educational materials are just emerging. In this paper, we aim to understand the educational needs of software product managers, and why embedding them in a software team is valuable. To do this, we collected survey responses from 59 software product managers and 63 software engineers, with responses from at least 24 companies, to identify the topics, skills, and abilities that software product managers find important for the role and the value they provide to software teams. Our results reveal that a software product manager's value stems from their ability to provide the team with direction and a plan, give context for decision-making, and effectively communicate across stakeholders. To support this, someone new to the role must have competencies in technical and non-technical areas. A software product manager must excel at interpersonal communication, understanding the technical atmosphere, and deriving product sense from a vision and strategy. This paper provides the groundwork for future software product management curricula by identifying 21 key competencies and 10 factors to describe the role's value in software teams.