If You Are An Experienced Product Manager And Want A New Challenge, Read On…
Since igaming businesses all offer online services, there are many competing internal priorities about how best to assign tasks and deploy resources so that the website and it’s services are constantly being improved. How do those priorities get resolved and translated into action? Who chooses, organises and oversees product development? A product manager – often known as a product owner – has a pivotal role that sits between upper management, design, development, testing and marketing.
Contents
What is a product manager?
Product managers need to be expert organisers. They will receive competing requests for development department time constantly. They will spend large parts of their working days organising, prioritising and assigning tasks in systems like Jira, Trello, Asana and Slack. They will also attend lots of internal meetings where company or country managemers are setting the next steps of development priorities.
A product manager needs to be involved with the development team and their workflow. This might mean sprints, agile or scrum.
Larger companies might have several product managers because the workload can be overwhelming. At an online casino that your author worked for there was one very overworked product owner (on the verge of a nervous breakdown), when I arrived at the company. One year later there were four, very busy, product owners! In these situations, an operator might have a product owner per language, or by department (such as payments, games, SEO, front end, etc).
YES! PLEASE HELP ME FIND A NEW JOB AS A PRODUCT MANAGER
Product managers need to be both perfectionists and realists because they need to want a website and service to work perfectly, but be able to accept that there are some improvements that can never be justified either by cost or by benefit. Product owners also need to enjoy using the website that their company has built or is building. They need to be able to spot problems, find bugs, imagine UX / UI improvements, hunt out BI data and think about a perfect website. This means that they also need to spend some time every week using the competition’s websites to look for ideas for potential improvements and upgrades.
As with everything else in an igaming and betting company, language plays an important role in the work of a product owner. Internally, most companies use English as their language but their website might be split into 6, 8 or 10 different languages. This usually means that a product owner for a major brand can be an English speaker because it is presumed that they will not find any single individual that speaks all the right languages they need. However, many affiliate businesses only operate websites in one or two languages. These businesses then really need product managers that speak those specific languages. Good examples of this would be German or Danish, for example.
Being a product manager in an igaming operator is a high profile role within the company. The responsibilities require the job holder to be in regular communication with most parts of the business. This means that the product manager quickly gets to know everyone including upper management. It is probably difficult to be promoted upwards from product manager, since the next most obvious step would be COO or CTO and in many companies these are very big jobs requiring substantial experience.
YES! PLEASE HELP ME FIND A NEW JOB AS A PRODUCT MANAGER
How much do product managers earn in igaming?
Product managers have key roles and they work hard. It is quite normal for a product manager to be a very responsible person in their twenties, earning substantially more than their peers. An annual salary of €50,000 would be quite normal for a product manager. An applicant with substantial experience, or even better, igaming experience at a major brand name operator, would be able to negotiate a higher salary.
If you are looking for a new job in product management, let us help!
We have worked in the igaming sector for the last few years and know many, many people within it. Over time, we have come to learn who are the best and worst people to work with. Here at MaltaStar we have partnered with a recruitment consulting firm who specialises in igaming and has a strong presence in Malta. We have personally used their services – that means that we have been placed ourselves by them – and liked them so much that we now recommend them to others! If you would like to have our recommended partner help you, please follow the link below to send us your details today.