Why Become a Product Analyst? Careers, Salaries, Data

Product analysts observe how people use products and analyze the data they collect, tracking usage patterns, identifying trends, and inferring customers' preferences, needs, and behaviours.

If you love data and are curious, innovative, and collaborative, consider a career as a product analyst. Product analysts are in high demand, and organizations need them to gather and interpret data to design better products and services. As a product analyst, you'll work on exciting projects throughout the product lifecycle and directly impact product strategy and business performance.

What is a product analyst?

As a product analyst, you’ll research and analyze customers' behaviours when using a product or service. Companies that design and manufacture consumer products like office, home, car, and tech gadgets typically employ product analysts.

The product analyst's job entails gathering and analyzing data on how customers use a product. This allows you to determine what features are widely adopted and which need improvement. You can contribute to every stage of product development, from pre-design market research to analyzing post-release market trends. You’ll also help decide when a product has come to the end of its life.

What are the typical job responsibilities of a product analyst?

Product analysts gather information, analyze it, and draw conclusions. Analysts are essential to help us understand what's happening in a world flooded with data. Working as a product analyst, you'll:

• Be at the center of the action and responsible for providing the insight that drives management decisions on product direction and investment.

• Work at the heart of product planning and development, helping teams create products by providing them with data-driven insights about customers and markets.

• Be responsible for customer and market research and competitive analysis.

• Collect and analyze data to identify areas for improvement in product and product lifecycle processes.

• Understand the needs of different customers, user groups, and stakeholders involved in the product life cycle.

• Conduct research to identify problems, gaps, pricing strategies, and market opportunities.

• Help translate findings into actionable business requirements, specifications, and features.

• Coordinate with other departments and key organizational stakeholders, including project managers, developers, designers, and marketers.

A product analyst’s daily activities vary, as they do different things at various product lifecycle stages. You'll gather and analyze data, refine insights, formulate suggestions, and present your data and insights.  

Monitor product performance

As a product analyst, you’ll monitor product performance and its lifecycle. It's important to look for patterns and trends that indicate how well a product performs on the market, monitor sales numbers, and gather customer feedback data to gauge performance.

Analyze customer feedback 

A product analyst’s day-to-day role involves using data to understand customer perception of products. You may interview customers directly or facilitate focus groups with several customers. You may even conduct polls to collect feedback from many customers on specific issues related to the product you’re evaluating.

As a product analyst, you’ll also:

• Set up and manage daily, weekly, and monthly product performance tracking and reporting processes.

• Develop new tools and reports to improve daily operations.

• Perform ad hoc analysis to support business decisions.

• Research information about products under analysis

• Assist in all activities involved in taking a product from conception to the launch stage.

• Build dashboards in Tableau or other business intelligence (BI) tools for the company to use to track product performance.

• Partner with the growth marketing team to track, analyze, and report on the impact of marketing campaigns on product performance

• Collate feedback from customers about their level of satisfaction with the product 

Evaluate products and find ways to improve performance

You’ll draw insights about products from the data you’ve gathered. The goal of a product analyst is to evaluate products to determine how they can be improved or updated and to study competitors' products’ quality and price points to ensure their product is competitive. This information can help to make data inferences informed by your experience.

Create reports and presentations about product data findings.

As a product analyst, you frequently create reports and presentations about data findings and insights. You’ll use charts, graphs, tables, or other visuals to represent the data in a way other stakeholders easily understand. In some cases, you’ll also need to present and justify the findings to senior management.

Workplace skills required for a career as a product analyst

When building your resume for a product analyst role, knowing the skills and experience employers seek is helpful. Here are some of the top skills you'll need throughout a product analytics career:

• Creativity: As an analytics professional, you must think creatively and outside the norm, mainly when finding solutions to complex issues.

• Motivation: While working as a product analyst, you often investigate new products and processes, which can mean working independently on your initiative. 

• Critical thinking: You must evaluate large amounts of data and quickly identify patterns and trends that can inform business decisions.

• Communication: As a product analyst, you must be able to share your findings with others verbally and in written reports. You must also explain technical information and data-driven insights to non-technical colleagues.

• Collaboration: A product analyst's findings often impact the other employees’ work. You must be able to effectively share information with colleagues, accept feedback gracefully, and use collaborative efforts to improve your work processes.

• Organizational skills: Product analysts often work on multiple projects simultaneously, so you must be organized and keep track of each project. You’ll also be careful about keeping data up to date. Outdated numbers and disorganized data will affect your ability to draw insights.

Technical skills of a product analyst

In addition to core workplace skills, you’ll need specific technical proficiencies to get a product analyst job and succeed in the role.

Knowledge in economics

Understanding the economic principles that govern product development and market research is essential. Product analysts use data to help drive decisions that improve product performance. This includes being comfortable with basic economic concepts like supply and demand.

Market research

It's beneficial to have experience in conducting market research. This includes familiarity with the tools and methods used to gather customer information, their needs, and their product perception.

Writing detailed and comprehensive reports.

As a product analyst, you must produce detailed reports by summarizing and presenting your findings in an easily understood manner. Success will be about how well you tell the story of the analyzed data. If you can engage stakeholders' interests with the impact of your insights, you’ll affect change. 

Data analytics and product analyst techniques

You’ll need experience using data analytics tools to analyze large data sets and derive insights from them. Some of the data analytics techniques you’ll need to know are:

• Cohort analysis

• A/B testing

• Retention analysis

• Heat mapping

• Form analysis

• Funnel analysis

• Session replay

• User survey

Product management

It would help if you had a strong grasp of the product management lifecycle and a good understanding of the product design, development, and management process. It helps you understand how products are designed to meet customer needs and how they are developed from conceptualization to the final product. It enables you to comprehend how products are produced and distributed to customers after they leave the developers' hands. This background is necessary to help you draw actionable insights in your product analyst role.

SQL

Structured query language (SQL) is essential for any product analyst, as it allows you to extract information from various databases across your organization. You’ll need SQL to gain access to the data you want to work with for your analysis. You may also need NoSQL data skills if your company uses big data warehouses of unstructured data.

Statistics

Statistics is an essential skill you need as an analyst. You’ll have to find, collect, and analyze data, making conclusions based on the findings. This means you must be good at statistics. You’ll understand the statistical side of data analytics, be able to make projections and know how to infer causation and correlations from data.

MS Office applications

Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, or similar applications from competitors like Google, are used daily.

What is the average annual salary of a product analyst?

According to Glassdoor, Canada's average product analyst salary is $67,954 [1]. 

Other similar job titles

Additional job titles related to the product analyst role with similar competencies are:

• Senior product analyst: $90,522 [2]

• Lead product analyst: $65,230 [3]

• Market research analyst: $58,170 [4]

• Product insights manager: $94,278 [5]

• Product consultant: $68,351 [6]

Career paths product analysts move on to

Product analyst roles enable you to build strong experience in product marketing and management. Some of the senior roles you could advance to after working as a product analyst include:

• Product marketing manager: $98,971 [7]

• Product manager: $99,747 [8]

• Product director: $163,424 [9]

• Product lifecycle manager: $98,438 [10]

• E-commerce manager: $76,452 [11]

• Digital marketing manager: $56,891 [12]

What is the typical background of a product analyst?

There are no specific educational requirements for product analyst jobs. Still, employers usually look for candidates with a formal degree and experience from an internship. Some companies prefer candidates with graduate degrees.

Some companies will take experience in lieu of a college degree. 

Certifications

Employers highly prize certifications like Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) and Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP). Some employers require certifications in data analytics and product management.

Ready to get started on a product analyst career?

Becoming a product analyst can be an exciting and rewarding career. You’ll be pivotal to the success of product launches, marketing campaigns, and company growth. The experience you gain can also open opportunities for career advancement in marketing, product, and management roles.

If you’re ready to take your next step into a product analyst career, you can start building your knowledge and skills by learning online. Earn an IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate to learn job-ready competencies in data analytics, or take an Introduction to Data Analytics course on Coursera to learn the basics.