The ROI of Investing in Product Management

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Many company leaders question whether product management training and coaching is worth the cost. Some may have tried programs in the past that didn’t deliver. Others simply struggle to see a clear return on investment.

Sadly, only 21% of product managers have been trained in the practices of product management. Many more have been trained in Scrum or SAFe but that’s delivery, not strategy. It’s development, not product management.

But here’s the thing: product management is one of the highest-leverage roles in a company.

When done well, it shapes the decisions on what we make, how it gets built, how it’s sold, and whether customers want to buy it. Training product managers isn’t just about skills development—it’s about avoiding wasted investment, lost productivity, and missed revenue opportunities.

Let’s break down the ROI question into three parts:

1. What’s the value of product management?

2. What’s the value of training product managers?

3. What’s the value of training to the product managers themselves?

   
   

The Value of Product Management

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, put it plainly: “What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?”

That’s the heart of product management. The role exists to ensure organizations are solving the right problems for the right customers—and doing it in ways that create real business value.

Great product managers:

• Cull through hundreds of ideas to identify the few that will move the needle.

• Understand buyer and customer friction as well as internal bottlenecks.

• Empower design, engineering, marketing, and sales with clarity on what matters most.

Yet despite its importance, 79% of organizations report that product management roles are poorly defined or misunderstood. Too often, product managers and product owners never talk to customers, making prioritization nearly impossible.

The cost of that? Wasted time, wasted money, and wasted opportunities.

The Value of Training Product Managers

Good product management doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a shared language, clear processes, and the skills to connect strategy, market insight, and execution. That’s where training pays off.

Training delivers ROI by ensuring:

• Market insights drive decisions, not gut feel.

• Leadership sees the business case behind tough trade-offs.

• Development teams have a backlog of meaningful problems, not random requests.

• Marketing speaks to buyers in their language, not in technobabble.

• Sales has tools and stories that resonate—and stay on message.

Without strong product management, organizations fall into “random acts”: random acts of sales, where reps create their own materials; random acts of marketing, where teams focus on features instead of value; and worst of all, random acts of development—where teams build the wrong product altogether.

One team with $1M in salaries spent a year building something customers didn’t want. That’s $1,000,000 gone, before you even count lost opportunity.

Measuring the ROI

So how do you put numbers to training? Start with productivity.

The average product manager in the US earns about $120,000 per year—roughly $60/hour. If training helps one manager save just one hour of wasted time each week, that’s 50 extra hours a year, or $3,000 in lost productivity. If clarity in roles and process saves more hours each week, the ROI doubles or triples.

Multiplier Effect

Then consider the multiplier effect. Product managers don’t work in isolation—they guide development, sales, and marketing. And they stand in for the leadership and the customers.

• Development: A single product manager supports a team of 7–9 developers. If those developers waste an hour a week waiting on direction, the cost adds up fast—tens of thousands of dollars annually.

• Sales: Research shows sales reps spend 31% of their time searching for or creating content. If product managers provide the right tools, positioning, and messaging, even small reductions in wasted time have a massive revenue impact.

• Marketing: Many product managers serve as the voice of the customer to marketing teams, providing details on products, new features, capabilities, and competitive analysis. These drive the creation of campaigns, messaging, and sales enablement tools necessary to support customer-facing teams.

Investing in your product management teams ensures they can actually deliver that leverage.

The Value of Training to Product Managers

Training isn’t just good for the company—it’s good for the individuals, too.

Zig Ziglar, American salesman and motivational speaker (and my sales training coach back in the day), famously said, “The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training them and keeping them.”

Retention matters. Investing in your product team members shows that you’re investing in their futures. Replacing an employee can cost 50–150% of their annual salary. Perhaps that’s why 41% of employees say they’ll leave a company that doesn’t invest in their learning, compared to only 12% who would leave if training is provided.

For product managers in particular, training and coaching provides clarity of role, confidence in decision-making, and a path to growth. And for employers, it builds loyalty while reducing turnover costs.

Training as a Strategic Investment

Many companies invest heavily in training for developers and sales teams, but frequently overlook product management. That’s a mistake. Nearly half of organizations report that process is their biggest challenge in product management. Training fills that gap by standardizing methods, clarifying roles, and reducing wasted effort.

A common benchmark is to allocate 3% of salary to professional development. For a product manager earning $120,000, that’s $3,600 a year. Compare that to the expected productivity gains—even modest ones—and the ROI is clear.

Final Thoughts

The ROI of product management training is both measurable and exponential. It shows up in productivity gains, reduced waste, better alignment across teams, stronger retention, and ultimately, in products that succeed in the market.

The real question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in your product management team. It’s whether you can afford not to.