Why Become a Product Analyst? Careers, Salaries, Data

Product analysts watch how people use products and then analyse the data they collect—tracking usage patterns, identifying trends, and making inferences about customers' preferences, needs, and behaviours.

If you love data and are curious, innovative, and collaborative, you might want to consider a career as a product analyst. Product analysts are in high demand. Organisations 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 will research and analyse customers' behaviours when using a product or service. Companies that design and manufacture consumer products, such as office, home, car, and tech gadgets, typically employ product analysts.

The product analyst's job entails gathering and analysing data on how customers use a particular product. That data allows you to determine what product features are widely adopted and which need improvement. You can contribute to every stage of developing a new product, from conducting market research before the actual design process begins to analysing market trends after the product is available. 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, analyse it, and draw conclusions. Analysts are essential to help us understand what's happening in a world constantly flooded with data. Working as a data analyst, you'll:

• Be at the centre 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 analyse data to identify improvement areas in product and product lifecycle processes.

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

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

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

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

Your daily activities as a product analyst will vary. You'll do different things at different product lifecycle stages. You'll gather and analyse data, refine insights, formulate suggestions, and present your findings.  

Monitor product performance

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

Analyse customer feedback 

The day-to-day role of a product analyst involves using data to understand customer perception of products. You may interview customers directly, facilitate focus groups with several customers at once, or 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 day-to-day 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 BI tools for the company to use to track product performance

• Partner with the growth marketing team to track, analyse, 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, as well as to study competitors' products in terms of quality and price point to ensure the product you are evaluating is competitive with others in the market. This information can then help to make data inferences informed by your experience.

Create reports and presentations about product data findings

Creating reports and presentations about data findings and insights is a frequent task as a product analyst. You’ll use charts, graphs, tables, or other visuals to represent the data in a way other stakeholders easily understand. Sometimes, you might also present and justify your findings to senior management.

Workplace skills required for a career as a product analyst

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

Creativity. As an analytics professional, you must be able to think creatively and outside the norm, mainly when tasked with 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 be able to 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, both verbally and in written reports. You’ll also need to explain technical information and data-driven insights to non-technical colleagues.

Collaboration. A product analyst's findings often impact the work of other employees. It's crucial to be able to effectively share information with colleagues, gracefully accept feedback, and use collaborative efforts to improve work processes.

Organisational skills. Often there will be a need to work on multiple projects simultaneously, so you must be organised and keep track of each project. Keeping data up-to-date is equally critical because outdated numbers and disorganised 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 manager 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. It also includes being comfortable with basic economic concepts like supply and demand.

Market research

Experience conducting market research is beneficial. Familiarity with the tools and methods used to gather customer information, needs, and perceptions of products helps product analysts perform their job functions.

Writing detailed and comprehensive reports.

Be able to produce detailed reports by summarising and presenting your findings in an easily understood manner. Your success will depend on how well you tell the story of the analysed data. If you can engage the interest of stakeholders with the impact of your insights, you’ll be able to affect change. 

Data analytics and product analyst techniques

Experience using data analytics tools to analyse large datasets and derive insights from them will be needed. 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

You should have a strong grasp of the product management lifecycle, providing a thorough foundation in product design, development, and management. This background helps you understand everything from how products are designed to meet customer needs to development from conceptualisation to the final product. It enables you to comprehend product production and distribution 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 enables you to extract information from various databases across your organisation. 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 analyse data, making conclusions based on the findings. To do so necessitates proficiency in statistics. You’ll understand the statistical side of data analytics, be able to make projections and 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?

The average product analyst salary in the UK is £44,183. Additional compensation from tips, profit sharing, and commissions will be around £3,415 [1]. 

Other similar job titles

Additional job titles are related to the product analyst role, and these roles require having similar competencies:

• Senior product analyst: £62,824 [2]

• Lead product analyst: £61,111 [3]

• Market research analyst: £27,562 [4]

• Product insights manager: £52,941 [5]

• Product consultant: £45,000 [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 positions you could advance to after working as a product analyst include:

• Product marketing manager: £53,962 [7]

• Product manager: £55,042 [8]

• Product director: £98,335 [9]

• Product lifecycle manager: £60,000 [10]

• Ecommerce manager: £50,000 [11]

• Digital marketing manager: £44,640 [12]

What is the typical background of a product analyst?

The position does not require specific qualifications. Still, employers usually look for candidates with at least a bachelor’s degree in business management, economics, finance, or another relevant field. Some companies prefer candidates with postgraduate degrees.

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 up 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. Learn job-ready competencies in data analytics by earning an IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate, for example. You can also learn the basics in an Introduction to Data Analytics course on Coursera.