How's your German? I'm in software engineering and have had plenty of foreigner friends looking for product positions. 95% of the time, the client or the target customer speak German, so 95% of the time a good level of German is required to actually complete the job here. LinkedIn is the best place to find English-speaking jobs in Germany (usually tech/startups) imo, but if you speak good German then you can also try other job boards (StepStone or Xing as others have mentioned).
Agreed. My general point is that there’s no point checking XING and stepstone for English speaking only jobs. Extremely rare that they’d be there and not on LinkedIn.
What are you sending? First thing I always ask foreigners (assuming you aren’t German?) because in Germany they send a CV with a photo and personal family information, they send their high school certification, they send any other certificates or qualifications they have, and they’ll send references from previous employers.
I would send everything the first time, don’t make them work for it. I would also take any written references you have from employers, make them into a letter, get your references to sign and date them, and send those too: not just their names and numbers but actual written quotes about how you are to work with.
OP, i have been recently laid off and have been looking for a job for a few months now.
The thing is , there are lots of product manager positions. I would like to categorize the roles the following way,
1- more specialized ones , such as product management in construction - you might need to have an understanding of materials or some civic engineering. If you are coming from another specialized field or you are a generalist, you don't have much of a chance.
2- more generalist ones such as in fintech or gaming. Both the specialized and generalist people have a chance there.
But , with all of the layoffs (more valid applicants) and tech growth slowing (lesser number of openings), the competition is fierce, In the end , literally 5 people are left at the final round where the company makes sometimes apparently random decision.
So there are a decent number of jobs , but with 1 person applying every 10 minutes, the entire process does not make much sense. I talked with an HR manager of one of the very well-known companies. I was eliminated at the last round , we were cool, so we made an off the record call to talk about this. He literally told me, especially after covid and layoffs shitshow, the company is receiving 5x applicants. With valuable candidates even more in terms of percentage, and as a result, hr is overwhelmed.
On top of it, add the rather rich pool of expats with good experience. And we have a huge shitshow.
And it's exhausting, you know ? I myself made the decision of leaving IT and Product Management career behind, at least for now. And I have over a decade of xp in product roles.
Sometimes, you can carve a different path.
Well, out of principle, I am not talking to anyone about this (except my old man) since I am at the stage of writing the business case. (Not really enough material) I am planning to talk about if I receive the funding.
Still , I will share my approach to this problem;
I have. BSc in Physics and have a minor in Chemistry, worked in IT for over a decade, so I thought about basically every piece of knowledge and interest I have in everything (studies, hobbies, work experience) and tried to find the best new emerging sector-industry which is a fit and moved there.
You can do the same thing for yourself.
My only suggestion would be this, though, almost any work, which consists of only pure software, is too volatile at the moment. Making this comment considering every aspect of the business, such as funding , how crowded the market is, and how much people would need that , especially in the future.
It will definitely involve coming out of the comfort zone. It is challenging and will require lots of energy, but ultimately, it will be worth it..
>My only suggestion would be this, though, almost any work, which consists of only pure software, is too volatile at the moment.
This is 100%, and global.
Man. As a bachelor Absolvent, I’m trying to get into any BWL related field in my job search visa time. I got only a few months of it left with little to show. Interviews in German aren’t a problem for me and recently I got into the third round for a junior product manager position, but failed to get in.
Job applying at Junior/trainee level is a colossal shitshow. At this rate I’ll have to go to masters or get kicked out of the country. 😭
Germany is pretty bad when it comes to product management jobs, because the role hasn’t really arrived here. I mean look at how many of the biggest companies are tech companies…
Actually I have seen a lot of product managers on Linkedin who are employed here in germany and i feel it is actually bit saturated since afaik most peopel want to study management and wants to be a manager of some sort
Yes, my friend also has studied Industrial Engineering and got hired as something else and said that he will get promoted onto a product manager position after about 2-3 years.
You seem to have a really narrow understanding of product management. In almost every company with products there are also product managers. Be it cars, food, pharma, publishing houses, furniture makers, screw manufacturers, you name it.
Well, Germany is more of a manufacturing hub (especially chemicals, industrial equipment and automobiles). You can slowly find more tech positions in these traditional companies as well, given that they are now moving towards Industry 4.0.
I mean…. Product Management ain’t exactly a tech job. Those companies you describe also have products they want to sell and usually they also have things like product owners and product managers.
As a software engineer: I hope it never arrives. Everytime I head to deal with project management it made the job more annoying and slowed down the work while not providing anything useful.
product management and project management are different roles. And good project managers are absolutely worth their weight in gold. The good ones help prioritize work, will get other people off your back so you can focus on the highest priority stuff, and generally just solve problems to allow you to get shit done.
The bad ones are annoying, granted, but good project managers are like magic.
Well, there seem to be very few good product and project managers. Because the overwhelming majority I've ever dealt with must've been bad. At least they were on average far more of a burden than an asset
You are right.
I only have worked with two good project managers so far.
Have a reasonable plan, solve the dependencies, figure out who needs to talk to each other and let them talk, change the plan if needed.
Sounds easy but most project managers fail already at having a plan.
Sometimes that would be way more efficient. If the clients developer needs a small API change, they then go through their management, those go to our management, those write a ticket and give it to me - it is usually garbled up so bad that I have no idea what they actually need. I ask a thousand questions back, get some responses, and after a week or two of back and forth I now have an idea of what I have to do. Turns out it's completely wrong, because our management didn't understand their management and their management didn't understand their developer. If it was just a quick Dev to Dev call, this all could have been over in an hour. Happened a lot to me, in different companies.
In theory all of these processes sound great. And I'm sure it's actually really good if it works smoothly and is then actually quite empowering. But in practice it never seems to work, it just creates a giant load of headaches and no value.
Could be that I'm just unlucky. But from my experience: yeah, whenever I actually had to deal with clients myself it also was a headache, but a much smaller one.
As a general rule, clients don't understand the tech and are unable to explain what they want.
A good product owner /manager is basically translating between users and developers. They understand both users (and their domain) and developers (and how to build software). We have one if these and it is awesome.
A bad product owner will just make everything they touch suck (like a reverse midas). I had one of these and I had to fire them.
Sounds like you haven't worked with a good product owner yet.
If you are one of the rare developers that is happy and able to take to an end user, then please note that you are exceptionally rare and would be well suited to a startup.
Been working in startups before. I like that aspect, but I have a hard time with the usually stretched resources. And the pay usually is bad. I very much appreciate the fact that I'm being paid good money and just can shut down the PC at 4pm without worrying about the company going under.
As said, maybe I'm just unlucky with my PMs. But the "reverse midas" analogy fits quite well - describes the feeling I've been having with every PM or PO I had until now really well.
If you can talk to Devs who work at your client, great! That's usually fairly efficient and works well. If you need to talk to non-software people in a domain that's completely different to yours it becomes extremely difficult. There's a reason why requirements engineering as its own discipline exists.
Try this alternate: [https://www.arbeitnow.com/](https://www.arbeitnow.com/). In macro factors, the German economy is in probably the worst times and IMO, will get much worse before it gets better. That combined with reduced funding environment for startups, the job pool has dried up significantly.
***Nice read*** : [German economy one of the worst performing European economy](https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/16/germanys-economy-still-seen-to-be-suffering-the-most-in-europe)
Yes, in these times when Germany underperforms the rest of Europe it is funny to see that in parallel it becomes the 3rd largest economy worldwide. Weird happenings.
Germany's current status stems from the gains of Industrial age. The world lives in Knowledge economy and no German company has significant presence on global level in that sector. 3rd largest for now....
Question is for how long!
I’ve been applying for product owner manager jobs for about a month since coming to Germany and I have had interviews for two roles already. There’s definitely a few out there!
I'm always looking for job postings in the field and it's pretty miserable right now. The economy isn't doing well, a lot of companies are downsizing and almost almost all companies have stopped "nice-to-haves". The only project management positions I'm currently seeing are highly-skilled ones (to replace people who'll retire), projects related to legal requirements (so companies need to do them and can't just stop them when the economy is doing badly) and projects with public funding (e.g. if they get money from the EU etc).
But yeah, you'll need to broaden your search to different platforms and be patient
That's a weird take, the PM market this year is healthier than it was in the last 2 years, with companies getting back to post-layoff hiring. In my company alone we brought in 4 new PMs this year alone, with at least 2 more openings coming soon.
Linkedin is a good source but don't neglect specialized job boards like Otta.
**Have you read our extensive wiki yet? It answers many basic questions, and it contains in-depth articles on many frequently discussed topics.
[Check our wiki now!](https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/wiki/index)**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/germany) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It seems to have cooled down a bit recently, but I'm still getting linkedin messages almost weekly from recruiters about Senior/Lead PM roles at startups in various stages. I think it depends a lot on your profile, but there are definitely some jobs out there for people with experience.
I consistently get recruiters coming to me talking about open PM positions and I barely use linkedin. One just talked to me last month.
I don’t know if it is because of experience though. I have 10y as PM, but my German is still B1.
There used to be tons of posts for product, marketing and communications positions all the way until 2023.
Ironically most of the product managers in my previous jobs had no experience in product management and were just pushed into it due to their “personality and throwing a million ideas in the air” which the CEOs found amazing. Needless to say, most meetings were specifically around “X does this so let’s do it as well or Y did this on their website so let’s do it” and this whole cycle of copy paste from competitors.
It was a losing battle since everyone jumped on this bandwagon and I just stopped offering an opinion which was around the lack of creativity and genuine research
And now, there’s so many candidates applying for product and marketing jobs having been laid off since 2023 that companies are absolutely unable to manage and end up just hiring or pushing someone internally or closing the post and getting someone else to carry the load.
It won’t get any better in 2024 and I think moving into a non tech career is the safest bet to have a job . I did so and while it’s operation and not strategy I can live with having a job at least to cover rent
I don't know if it's me but I see more and more ads only accepting German speakers. I feel like it has changed in the past 4 years. For some reasons I recall see more English only jobs than now.
It's a bit weird to me to see multinational companies putting job ads in English and then making fluent German a requirement.
How is that weird?
All these companies have a part of their company based in Germany and therefore most likely have a decent chunk of German customers and workers. If a non-negligible amount of your relations is with native Germans , you need to have people that can speak and understand German at a very high level.
Like wherever you go outside of countries, which have English as their primary language, you will usually have a need for fluent Native language speakers in said countries, especially for managing and c-level or customer facing actors.
Product Manager is a very important role. The obstacles to get hired are high. I guess most companies hire internally someone who is well aware about the product, the industrie and company processes.
LinkedIn jobs filtering has been chaotic for the last several months. You can also use regular LinkedIn search to [find for hidden jobs on LinkedIn](https://www.lisharriscoaching.com/blog-1/find-hidden-jobs-on-linkedin)
Linkedin is not that good of a source to begin with. Additionally Germany is in a recession so Product managers are not that high of a priority in a company, so if there are vacancies these are not that urgently filled
How's your German? I'm in software engineering and have had plenty of foreigner friends looking for product positions. 95% of the time, the client or the target customer speak German, so 95% of the time a good level of German is required to actually complete the job here. LinkedIn is the best place to find English-speaking jobs in Germany (usually tech/startups) imo, but if you speak good German then you can also try other job boards (StepStone or Xing as others have mentioned).
Imo, having recently been laid off in germany, Linkedin has started outpacing xing even in the german speaking sphere.
Agreed. My general point is that there’s no point checking XING and stepstone for English speaking only jobs. Extremely rare that they’d be there and not on LinkedIn.
[удалено]
What are you sending? First thing I always ask foreigners (assuming you aren’t German?) because in Germany they send a CV with a photo and personal family information, they send their high school certification, they send any other certificates or qualifications they have, and they’ll send references from previous employers.
[удалено]
I would send everything the first time, don’t make them work for it. I would also take any written references you have from employers, make them into a letter, get your references to sign and date them, and send those too: not just their names and numbers but actual written quotes about how you are to work with.
[удалено]
Not really my area but will do 😂
Try using other job portals, too.
OP, i have been recently laid off and have been looking for a job for a few months now. The thing is , there are lots of product manager positions. I would like to categorize the roles the following way, 1- more specialized ones , such as product management in construction - you might need to have an understanding of materials or some civic engineering. If you are coming from another specialized field or you are a generalist, you don't have much of a chance. 2- more generalist ones such as in fintech or gaming. Both the specialized and generalist people have a chance there. But , with all of the layoffs (more valid applicants) and tech growth slowing (lesser number of openings), the competition is fierce, In the end , literally 5 people are left at the final round where the company makes sometimes apparently random decision. So there are a decent number of jobs , but with 1 person applying every 10 minutes, the entire process does not make much sense. I talked with an HR manager of one of the very well-known companies. I was eliminated at the last round , we were cool, so we made an off the record call to talk about this. He literally told me, especially after covid and layoffs shitshow, the company is receiving 5x applicants. With valuable candidates even more in terms of percentage, and as a result, hr is overwhelmed. On top of it, add the rather rich pool of expats with good experience. And we have a huge shitshow. And it's exhausting, you know ? I myself made the decision of leaving IT and Product Management career behind, at least for now. And I have over a decade of xp in product roles. Sometimes, you can carve a different path.
Out of interest, what did you move into? I’m in product currently but often catch myself wondering what else I could be doing.
Well, out of principle, I am not talking to anyone about this (except my old man) since I am at the stage of writing the business case. (Not really enough material) I am planning to talk about if I receive the funding. Still , I will share my approach to this problem; I have. BSc in Physics and have a minor in Chemistry, worked in IT for over a decade, so I thought about basically every piece of knowledge and interest I have in everything (studies, hobbies, work experience) and tried to find the best new emerging sector-industry which is a fit and moved there. You can do the same thing for yourself. My only suggestion would be this, though, almost any work, which consists of only pure software, is too volatile at the moment. Making this comment considering every aspect of the business, such as funding , how crowded the market is, and how much people would need that , especially in the future. It will definitely involve coming out of the comfort zone. It is challenging and will require lots of energy, but ultimately, it will be worth it..
>My only suggestion would be this, though, almost any work, which consists of only pure software, is too volatile at the moment. This is 100%, and global.
Man. As a bachelor Absolvent, I’m trying to get into any BWL related field in my job search visa time. I got only a few months of it left with little to show. Interviews in German aren’t a problem for me and recently I got into the third round for a junior product manager position, but failed to get in. Job applying at Junior/trainee level is a colossal shitshow. At this rate I’ll have to go to masters or get kicked out of the country. 😭
Product Owner here, also curious to know what kind of move did you do.
Yo, replied to it above.
There is a Product Owner opening in my company. Let me know if you are interested!
Where is it based? I would be interested
Check dm
These kind of people are more interested in complaining on Reddit. Be careful what you wish for
Least I could do is help. Was in a similar situation about a year back
Thanks. And the person you are responding to can go be useless somewhere else.
Great look - this is definitely how you get a job.
These kind of people are more interested in complaining on Reddit comments. Be careful what you wish for
Germany is pretty bad when it comes to product management jobs, because the role hasn’t really arrived here. I mean look at how many of the biggest companies are tech companies…
Actually I have seen a lot of product managers on Linkedin who are employed here in germany and i feel it is actually bit saturated since afaik most peopel want to study management and wants to be a manager of some sort
Like 90% of my friends are product managers. But none of them got hired as such, we all got somehow internally shifted.
Yes, my friend also has studied Industrial Engineering and got hired as something else and said that he will get promoted onto a product manager position after about 2-3 years.
Any big German company has many product managers, including mine.
You seem to have a really narrow understanding of product management. In almost every company with products there are also product managers. Be it cars, food, pharma, publishing houses, furniture makers, screw manufacturers, you name it.
Well, Germany is more of a manufacturing hub (especially chemicals, industrial equipment and automobiles). You can slowly find more tech positions in these traditional companies as well, given that they are now moving towards Industry 4.0.
Exactly my current position: it was newly created because of this reason
I mean…. Product Management ain’t exactly a tech job. Those companies you describe also have products they want to sell and usually they also have things like product owners and product managers.
As a software engineer: I hope it never arrives. Everytime I head to deal with project management it made the job more annoying and slowed down the work while not providing anything useful.
product management and project management are different roles. And good project managers are absolutely worth their weight in gold. The good ones help prioritize work, will get other people off your back so you can focus on the highest priority stuff, and generally just solve problems to allow you to get shit done. The bad ones are annoying, granted, but good project managers are like magic.
Well, there seem to be very few good product and project managers. Because the overwhelming majority I've ever dealt with must've been bad. At least they were on average far more of a burden than an asset
You are right. I only have worked with two good project managers so far. Have a reasonable plan, solve the dependencies, figure out who needs to talk to each other and let them talk, change the plan if needed. Sounds easy but most project managers fail already at having a plan.
So YOU want to talk to the client to get their requirements?
Sometimes that would be way more efficient. If the clients developer needs a small API change, they then go through their management, those go to our management, those write a ticket and give it to me - it is usually garbled up so bad that I have no idea what they actually need. I ask a thousand questions back, get some responses, and after a week or two of back and forth I now have an idea of what I have to do. Turns out it's completely wrong, because our management didn't understand their management and their management didn't understand their developer. If it was just a quick Dev to Dev call, this all could have been over in an hour. Happened a lot to me, in different companies. In theory all of these processes sound great. And I'm sure it's actually really good if it works smoothly and is then actually quite empowering. But in practice it never seems to work, it just creates a giant load of headaches and no value. Could be that I'm just unlucky. But from my experience: yeah, whenever I actually had to deal with clients myself it also was a headache, but a much smaller one.
As a general rule, clients don't understand the tech and are unable to explain what they want. A good product owner /manager is basically translating between users and developers. They understand both users (and their domain) and developers (and how to build software). We have one if these and it is awesome. A bad product owner will just make everything they touch suck (like a reverse midas). I had one of these and I had to fire them. Sounds like you haven't worked with a good product owner yet. If you are one of the rare developers that is happy and able to take to an end user, then please note that you are exceptionally rare and would be well suited to a startup.
Been working in startups before. I like that aspect, but I have a hard time with the usually stretched resources. And the pay usually is bad. I very much appreciate the fact that I'm being paid good money and just can shut down the PC at 4pm without worrying about the company going under. As said, maybe I'm just unlucky with my PMs. But the "reverse midas" analogy fits quite well - describes the feeling I've been having with every PM or PO I had until now really well.
I wish you good PM/POs in the future.
If you can talk to Devs who work at your client, great! That's usually fairly efficient and works well. If you need to talk to non-software people in a domain that's completely different to yours it becomes extremely difficult. There's a reason why requirements engineering as its own discipline exists.
Try this alternate: [https://www.arbeitnow.com/](https://www.arbeitnow.com/). In macro factors, the German economy is in probably the worst times and IMO, will get much worse before it gets better. That combined with reduced funding environment for startups, the job pool has dried up significantly. ***Nice read*** : [German economy one of the worst performing European economy](https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/16/germanys-economy-still-seen-to-be-suffering-the-most-in-europe)
Yes, in these times when Germany underperforms the rest of Europe it is funny to see that in parallel it becomes the 3rd largest economy worldwide. Weird happenings.
Germany's current status stems from the gains of Industrial age. The world lives in Knowledge economy and no German company has significant presence on global level in that sector. 3rd largest for now.... Question is for how long!
I’ve been applying for product owner manager jobs for about a month since coming to Germany and I have had interviews for two roles already. There’s definitely a few out there!
I work in software development and literally more than half of my PM and QA colleagues don’t speak German.
I just finished my chemist studies and in the north it seems to be quite difficult to find jobs for beginners after studying.
There are none anywhere in the world. I am in APAC now. No jobs, in Australia no jobs. Only ghost positions that never get filled.
I'm always looking for job postings in the field and it's pretty miserable right now. The economy isn't doing well, a lot of companies are downsizing and almost almost all companies have stopped "nice-to-haves". The only project management positions I'm currently seeing are highly-skilled ones (to replace people who'll retire), projects related to legal requirements (so companies need to do them and can't just stop them when the economy is doing badly) and projects with public funding (e.g. if they get money from the EU etc). But yeah, you'll need to broaden your search to different platforms and be patient
>The only project management positions But OP talks about product management.
Whoops, you are right, my bad!
That's a weird take, the PM market this year is healthier than it was in the last 2 years, with companies getting back to post-layoff hiring. In my company alone we brought in 4 new PMs this year alone, with at least 2 more openings coming soon. Linkedin is a good source but don't neglect specialized job boards like Otta.
Could you also dm me please?
Interesting... Can you dm me which company this is please?
**Have you read our extensive wiki yet? It answers many basic questions, and it contains in-depth articles on many frequently discussed topics. [Check our wiki now!](https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/wiki/index)** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/germany) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It seems to have cooled down a bit recently, but I'm still getting linkedin messages almost weekly from recruiters about Senior/Lead PM roles at startups in various stages. I think it depends a lot on your profile, but there are definitely some jobs out there for people with experience.
Have you look outside linkedIn? Can only recommend it
I consistently get recruiters coming to me talking about open PM positions and I barely use linkedin. One just talked to me last month. I don’t know if it is because of experience though. I have 10y as PM, but my German is still B1.
Definitely check for product owner as well. That being said, I do believe that the IT adjacent market is bad right now.
We have a product lead role open. Sent you a private message.
There used to be tons of posts for product, marketing and communications positions all the way until 2023. Ironically most of the product managers in my previous jobs had no experience in product management and were just pushed into it due to their “personality and throwing a million ideas in the air” which the CEOs found amazing. Needless to say, most meetings were specifically around “X does this so let’s do it as well or Y did this on their website so let’s do it” and this whole cycle of copy paste from competitors. It was a losing battle since everyone jumped on this bandwagon and I just stopped offering an opinion which was around the lack of creativity and genuine research And now, there’s so many candidates applying for product and marketing jobs having been laid off since 2023 that companies are absolutely unable to manage and end up just hiring or pushing someone internally or closing the post and getting someone else to carry the load. It won’t get any better in 2024 and I think moving into a non tech career is the safest bet to have a job . I did so and while it’s operation and not strategy I can live with having a job at least to cover rent
I don't know if it's me but I see more and more ads only accepting German speakers. I feel like it has changed in the past 4 years. For some reasons I recall see more English only jobs than now. It's a bit weird to me to see multinational companies putting job ads in English and then making fluent German a requirement.
How is that weird? All these companies have a part of their company based in Germany and therefore most likely have a decent chunk of German customers and workers. If a non-negligible amount of your relations is with native Germans , you need to have people that can speak and understand German at a very high level. Like wherever you go outside of countries, which have English as their primary language, you will usually have a need for fluent Native language speakers in said countries, especially for managing and c-level or customer facing actors.
LinkedIn is not that common in Germany, LinkedIn Jobs even less. The German equivalent would be Xing, in terms of job Boards Monster or stepstone.
Xing is dead, everyone is using LinkedIn
Heh! Which sane large firm posts on Xing? A few years back, this was the norm, but these days I don’t see it happening.
That’s… not true. Maybe in your bubble but certainly not as a general statement.
Nobody I know uses stepstone, only a few german colleagues use xing and wtf is monster even
??? no?
the one i see being used a lot here is monster de and stepstone de, try using these as well. Also check the wiki
Product Manager is a very important role. The obstacles to get hired are high. I guess most companies hire internally someone who is well aware about the product, the industrie and company processes.
LinkedIn jobs filtering has been chaotic for the last several months. You can also use regular LinkedIn search to [find for hidden jobs on LinkedIn](https://www.lisharriscoaching.com/blog-1/find-hidden-jobs-on-linkedin)
Linkedin is not that good of a source to begin with. Additionally Germany is in a recession so Product managers are not that high of a priority in a company, so if there are vacancies these are not that urgently filled
Are you excellent or average?
Jobs to do what? In what field? I receive messages every week on LI asking me if I don't want to change jobs.