
Product Owners: Typical Career Paths & How to Attract them to your Organisation
Posted June 5, 2025We recently launched our Product Owner Spotlight Report which took a deep-dive into the world of Product Owners to provide you with insight into everything from candidate location through to salary data.
But when it comes to career progression and benefits, what is it exactly that really makes this candidate pool tick?
In this blog we’ll walk you through the necessary skills you should look for in a Product Owner, the typical career path these candidates take as well as the work styles this talent pool utilises so you can make sure your offer remains competitive in the market.
Let’s get tucked in…
What skills should Product Owners have?
For candidates to succeed in the Product Owner role (and to stand out in the market), they need to be pragmatic, possess strong communication skills and ideally be well versed in agile methodologies and prioritisation techniques. They may also have obtained relevant certifications such as CSPO and PSPO.
This is important because the fundamental aspect of Product Ownership is being the conduit between business units and teams. Whether that is between UX and Software engineering or business stakeholders and technology functions, they are the central point of engagement. These are candidates who have chosen to move from development teams to Product Ownership and so will often have excellent soft skills and enjoy stakeholder management responsibilities.
What does a career path look like for a Product Owner?
So, what does a typical Product Owner career path look like?
Generally speaking, there seems to be two core starting points for a Product Owner to take the first steps in their career:
- Business Analyst
- Software Development
As they gain experience, they often undertake increased strategic responsibility and can evolve into a Senior Product Owner role, this typical means working more closely with senior stakeholders or owning multiple products.
In our experience, it’s at this point that many candidates want to continue to progress up the ladder, and so we begin to see them move into Product Management roles and Senior Product Management roles which have far broader scope and allows the candidate to be more strategic in nature. In these roles there will be more of focus on shaping and influencing the Product roadmap but also what that means for the wider business as well as technical or product strategies.
After this, the career path can evolve, but we find the job title can be subjective to the scale and size of the organisation, product or software engineering teams and the business teams in the organisation.
But is the opportunity to widen their scope of work and skill sets all that’s important to these candidates?
How to make your offer stand out
In our experience, while opportunities to work on exciting projects or products and getting stuck into cutting-edge tech stacks are still important to candidates, now more than ever we’re seeing these candidates care more about the nature of the work they’re doing, and the type of company they’re working for.
We’ve seen high-quality professionals prioritising important social or ethically impactful Products within domains such HealthTech, FinTech, MedTech and even tending to shy away from potentially controversial industries like gambling or tobacco.
It’s also interesting to note the working style Product Owners are tending to favour. According to our data from 400+ job boards in this market, we’re seeing 6.8% of these roles advertised as fully remote, 26.8% as hybrid and 66.4% as fully in the office. From conversations with candidates and clients alike, there seems to be a real preference towards Hybrid approach.
In our experience, almost all of the high-quality Product specialists we’ve placed in the last 18 months from junior to CPO level, have a preference for some time on site. Due to the sheer nature of the role, they are the middle person between various people and teams. These sought after candidates find they can perform their role better with some face time and a human touch, so make sure that’s an option for them.
Looking to find out more?
If you want to tap into the Product Owner, we’d love to hear from you. Our data is showing a 2% nationwide increase in Product Owner headcount PLUS Sanderson hiring volume for this role has gone up by a whopping 50%, so now is more important than ever to get a solid grasp on this market so you’re ready to make your next move.
Please do reach out to Khalid Razouki on [email protected] to carry on the conversation, and why not dive a little deeper into the Product Owner market by downloading a copy of the full report in the short form below.