Mark F. Schar and Micah Lande
Center for Design Research
Stanford University
424 Panama Mall Building 560 Stanford, CA 94305-2232
Email: mfschar@stanford.edu, micah@stanford.edu

Abstract
The role of Product Manager within industry is a driving force of innovation. Product Managers are trained as individual contributor engineers, yet evolve into multi- functional managers who lead the business, often through on-the-job training. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with Product Management practitioners and recruiters across a range of businesses, a collection of “what counts factors” emerged for success in this position. These characteristics, in turn, are used to define a workshop intervention to better prepare design engineering graduate students to face the challenges of the Product Manager role and succeed.