What is a product specialist? Role and responsibilities

In theory, a product manager is a well-defined position with a limited set of responsibilities. In practice though (as many of you know), you touch so many aspects of the product and need such a wide range of skills that it can begin to seem like PMs have to know everything. This is especially an issue in small to medium sized companies, where PMs can end up wearing too many hats.

On the other hand, sometimes in large organizations PMs become so focused, but have way too many projects that they oversee. In these cases, delegation becomes the only solution because the PM cannot possibly have enough bandwidth. But who do they delegate work to?

Enter product specialists! In this article, you’ll learn what a product specialist is, the key skill set that makes up the role, and how you can become one.

What is a product specialist?

A product specialist (PS) is a person with extensive knowledge about a specific product or product management-related responsibility. They’re experts in their field and are often the primary source of information, freeing some of the dependency from the core product manager.

Key skills for a product specialist

In order to be successful as a product specialist, there are some key skills that you need to have. These include:

• Knowledge sharing — A deep understanding of the different product’s features, benefits, and applications goes a long way. With this, you can explain mutual connections and dependencies, and potentially answer more complex technical queries
• Education and documentation — You need to be able develop documentation from any new development and train other departments and clients on different aspects of the product
• Customer insights — Product specialists can conduct extensive customer feedback analysis to extract potential product update proposals and identify trends
• Market research — It’s important that you can perform market research to identify new market niches and confirm whether a specific feature or product is something that the client base will appreciate
• Competitor watch — Similar to market research, product specialists keep tabs on other players on the market and flag anything that can be a potential danger or an opportunity to their own product
• Product development — A PS can take over from a PM to finalize development ticket tickets or take on the whole initiative when there’s too much on the PM’s plate
• Strategy — You help support the PM in gathering insights that will lead to a product strategy and other high-level product development plans
• Project management — Product specialists help the team with timely delivery of the promised increments, as well as assist with resolving any roadblocks that will stand in the way of a successful resolution

Now, that’s a lot, isn’t it? Arguably, that’s everything that a PM can also do. At the same time, it’s obvious that a single person can’t do all that (and more) during a regular working week. But that’s the key to understanding who a PS is. They can be tasked with any one of those aspects and give it all the time in the world.

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For example, rather than having the product manager rush the documentation between various calls, a product specialist can take several hours to perfect the text, give it helpful images, even videos, and figure out how to best distribute the new piece of information throughout the stakeholders.

To put it differently, a product specialist takes on some of the individual contributor part of the PM position. The major difference would be in responsibility for the product: a PS won’t be making any product decisions until promoted to PM. In fact, one might argue that a product specialist is simply a junior Product Manager, but that will depend on the set-up of your specific company.

Salary insights

Unfortunately, product specialist jobs are rare to come by and it’s hard to reliably write about salary brackets for this job title. However, as these are similar to junior product manager positions, let’s look at the ranges for mid-level PMs.

A PS should expect a salary close to the lower end of the brackets shown below:

• United States — The range typically spans from around $70,000 to over $160,000 annually
• Germany — Salaries can vary from about €54,000 to upwards of €100,000 per year
• India — The salary range for product managers can start from approximately ₹700,000 and go up to ₹3,000,000
• Canada — The range is generally between CA$65,000 and CA$140,000

That said, becoming a product specialist is one of the easiest ways to become a product manager. Thus, you can expect to move relatively quickly through those salary brackets and receive much better compensation.

How to become a product specialist

Landing your first product specialist role can be a challenge compared to landing an entry-level, junior product position. On top of that, it’s a position that’s hardly ever recruited externally. It’s far more likely that a PM pushes HR to take one or more of their responsibilities and create a role accordingly.

The thing is, you don’t have to wait for that to happen on its own. I will assume your dream position is not to become a PS, but a PM. However, a PS is a great element of this journey and you can actively make it happen for yourself!

On top of all the activities you can do to push your Product career journey (like education, helping the sitting PM, and building your own, hobby product), you can also actively offer to take some of the edge off your product manager. In this scenario, however, it’s not about taking on additional responsibilities to prove yourself, it’s an actual new position you would take on.

Now, it can start small by only assisting in a particular job (say, feedback analysis). Of course, you can spend an hour or two to look through recent data, but what if you could dedicate time to either write an AI capable of analyzing thousands of comments or research a product that can do that? Or maybe even figure out how to consolidate feedback from different streams into a single database? Maybe come up with some sort or tagging system? Or an automated report?

All of that can be done and would be valuable, but it needs someone focused on the job. That can be you! In time and with a proper development plan, this will eventually lead to the dream job: Product Manager!

Final thoughts

A product specialist isn’t a glorious job that a preschooler proclaims as their life goal. It’s ultimately a means to an end: For the PM and the company to finally get some non-critical job successfully completed.

For the PS, it’ll likely be a stepping stone to the product career. However, a product specialist is a valued member of the team and a sign that the current product manager and the company are successful.

If this wasn’t the case, a potential new position focused on a subset of PM responsibilities wouldn’t happen. That has one more implication: A company that invests in product specialists is likely not going anywhere and can help you grow your skills and career.

Featured image source: IconScout

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