Product management in Singapore: What startups need vs what they can afford

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Since I got more involved with the product management community in Singapore, I found myself explaining over and over again to founders, startup employees, and recruiters the nature of a product manager’s job. And the more I did, the more I felt that there’s a mismatch between the perception of product management in the ecosystem and the expectations of product managers who actually do the job.

I wasn’t sure if my experience was anecdotal or if there was something there, so I ran a survey about the state of product management in Singaporean startups. Coincidentally, Anh Han, a fellow member of the Product Management SG group on Facebook, ran a survey on PM salary ranges. Together with a cursory analysis of salary ranges listed on Tech in Asia Jobs, AngelList, and StartupJobs.Asia, those surveys gave interesting insights into what’s happening with product management in Singapore, and especially PM hiring.

Disclaimer: Even though I did my best to obtain responses, I still ended up with small samples. This means that not all results are statistically significant. If you want to help in getting more data next time, you can let me know in the comments if you’d like to participate in the next survey.

Study 1: The quality of product management

Sample size: 20
Respondents: Startup employees and founders

Insight 1: CEOs aren’t good product managers

Employees at startups where CEOs act as product managers rated the quality of product management practice in their companies at 2.6/5. In contrast, employees of companies with dedicated product managers (or CTOs or project managers who lead product) rated the quality of their product practice at 3.6/5.

Why this might be happening:

• Lack of time: Product management is a full-time job. A CEO’s involvement in product is usually much more high-level. That means in circumstances like this, they can’t compete with a dedicated PM in quality of execution.
• Lack of skill: It’s a tough pill to swallow for some, but being a founder and a visionary don’t automatically make one a good product manager. This is especially true for non-technical founders struggling to work with their software engineers. This hypothesis is partially confirmed by the fact that CTOs working as product managers score higher.

Insight 2: Most people in startups don’t fully understand what product managers do

The statement “most people at our startup understand the role of product managers well” received an average agreement score of 3.2/5 on a Likert scale. Personally, I feel that product managers in Singapore are too busy executing and don’t have a habit of taking some time to talk about their practice. We could do better when it comes to explaining how good product management can support founders and development teams.

Insight 3: Product managers seem to be in demand

Seventy percent of respondents stated that their companies plan to hire product managers within the next 12 months (take this data with a grain of salt, as some might belong to the same company). Notably, there was no difference between companies that already have product managers and companies that don’t; both wanted to hire PMs equally.

That said, the desire to hire product managers raises an important question: can Singaporean startups afford that?

Study 2: The cost of product management

How startups could get product managers

Future studies