Product Manager
What this job does:
Serves as the strategic bridge between scientific end-users (researchers, clinicians, bioinformaticians) and engineering and design teams, defining what products to build and why. Day-to-day involves gathering user needs through customer interviews and data analysis, writing product requirements documents, prioritizing feature backlogs, and aligning cross-functional teams around a product roadmap. Translates complex scientific workflows into product specifications and makes trade-off decisions about scope, timeline, and feasibility - acting as the CEO of the product at the intersection of science, technology, and business.
This job is similar to these lab/research tasks:
Deeply understanding scientific workflows and unmet needs, framing research questions and evaluating evidence across sources, synthesizing findings into coherent narratives, prioritizing directions based on data
Typical starting salary range
$120k to $175k
Salary estimate represented as 25th to 75th percentile. Gathered from recent job postings, Glassdoor.com, and Salary.com
Daily task breakdown
- Product strategy, roadmapping, and prioritization: vision, OKRs, backlog grooming (30%)
- Cross-functional coordination and stakeholder management (25%)
- User and customer research and scientific domain engagement: interviews, field visits, usage data (20%)
- Requirements definition and execution oversight: PRDs, sprint planning, QA, launch (15%)
- Market analysis, competitive intelligence, and other (10%)
Skills you'll use in this job:
Scientific domain expertise (genomics, molecular biology, clinical workflows); product management frameworks (Agile and Scrum, roadmapping, RICE and MoSCoW prioritization); data-driven decision-making (SQL, Amplitude, Mixpanel); user research and customer discovery (jobs-to-be-done, design thinking); cross-functional communication; technical fluency (software engineering concepts, APIs, cloud infrastructure); strategic thinking and business acumen; ability to synthesize complex scientific and technical information into clear product requirements; comfort with ambiguity and iterative decisions
Talk about these PhD skills in your resume and interview:
Talk about deeply understanding scientific end-users workflows, pain points, and unmet needs - something non-scientist PMs struggle to develop. Talk about framing research questions, evaluating evidence across sources, and synthesizing findings into coherent narratives, which maps directly to defining product requirements and roadmaps.
Alternative job titles to search:
Technical Product Manager - Life Sciences; Senior Product Manager - Genomics/Bioinformatics; Product Manager - Scientific Software; Product Manager - Precision Medicine; Product Lead - Research Tools; Product Manager - Clinical Data Platform; Product Owner - Life Sciences; Product Manager - Digital Health
*Note:
-Job titles are inconsistent between companies. Try various keywords.
-PhDs tend to undershoot seniority level. Target higher than you think.
