The 6 Most Underrated Product Management Skills
What the job descriptions won't tell you
Hi there, Product People. Welcome to another edition of All Things Product Management. This week, we’ll talk about PM skills: Product Managers have to be good at a lot of different things, but there are some subtle ones that are overlooked or taken for granted. These are the skills that will take you from good to great.
What Skills Do Product Managers Need?
The skills practiced by great Product Managers are tied to what they do in the day to day. There are some typical PM skills that you’re likely to see on a job posting or be asked about in an interview. These are the skills everyone knows and loves:
Technical skills. Depending on who you ask, and depending on the company, as an employee in the tech industry you may or may not need a CS degree. It’s true that companies like Google and Apple, favor formal technical education like in software engineering, or a proven track record of working at a highly technical level. But that’s not true for all companies, and great technical skills don’t make a great Product Manager.
Strategic skills. This is another typical PM skill that comes up time and time again, and is more nebulous to measure than technical skills. This is because you’ll often be in charge of tasks like building and owning the Product Roadmap, analyzing user and market research, and turning customer feedback into actionable insights. Decisions, decisions.
Data literacy. Data goes hand in hand with making these kinds of strategic decisions. It’s important that you’re able to communicate with data scientists and use data to back up your assumptions.
I could go on: time management, user research, stakeholder alignment. But while important, none of these are exactly underrated. In fact, a couple are overrated (I’m looking at you, computer science background). That prize goes to...
The 6 Most Underrated Product Management Skills
These are not the skills in the job descriptions, even though they are the ones good hiring managers are looking for. Most Product Managers stumble upon these skills by mistake and learn them through trial and error.
Grit
As a Product Manager, you have people in your ear every day telling you how the product should be and taking you away from the North Star. You have endless meetings and tasks. You’ll face products that flop, roadblocks and bottlenecks that’ll make you want to tear your hair out.
At their core, Product Managers are problem-solvers. You need to have that desire to get to the bottom of the problem and create a solution with your team, that figure-it-out-iveness that will keep you focused and sane amidst pressure and distractions.
As a leader, you have to stay steady in the storm and be an example to your team that it’s possible to stay the course and keep composure. Even when everything is falling apart, there is something salvageable. Even when you’re lost, you can regroup and find the way.
This goes hand-in-hand with being comfortable with ambiguity. The farther up you go in the PM ladder, the more decisions you have to make with incomplete information. You have to be confident enough to make the decision anyway, trust in your expertise and in your team, and figure it out!
Industry awareness
Part of that ability to make decisions in uncertain circumstances will come from your experience in the industry and in Product. It’s easy to get caught up in releases and feature delivery (execution mode) and lose sight of the industry trends. Industry awareness is absolutely key for product-market fit, which is solidly a responsibility of the Product Manager.
When conducting research for your own product/user base, you should also be keeping up with what’s happening in the industry at large.
Humility
That said, even when you know a lot, you don’t know everything. You accept that you can be wrong, that you’re not the only one with good ideas, and your team is the driving force behind any success.
Wanna-be-great PMs talk about how easy the job is and guarantee success to stakeholders—at which point they’re completely misinterpreting their role and the gravity of it.
There’s nothing wrong with being confident, or being proud of your achievements. But the line between confidence and arrogance is thin, and will affect how well you’re able to work with your teams.
One of the main myths surrounding Product Managers is that they’re the CEO of Product. While this metaphor works in a few ways, it’s not a good attitude for a Product Manager to walk around with. If you assume that you’re somehow an official authority over your teammates, and try to tell them what to do, you’ll lose their respect very quickly.
Listening
Listening is something that we all assume we’re inherently good at, because it’s something we do every day. In fact, listening is a skill that needs to be honed and used in the right way.
As a Product Manager, you have a lot of different voices to listen to. The Sales Team, the Product Team, stakeholders, management, your CEO, your customers…
You need to learn not just how to listen, but also how to make people feel heard. This may involve sending a summary of points made in a 1-1 with your teammates, or just following up on what was said. You won’t make any friends on your development team if they feel that talking to you is like talking to a brick wall.
You also need to know who to listen to. Just because someone’s voice is the loudest, doesn’t mean it’s the one you need to pay the most attention to.
Business Know-how
It’s not just enough to know how digital products get made. Product Managers are the bridge between customer needs, their Product Team, and business needs. It’s more inspiring to talk about customer-centricity than it is to talk about business profit, but the simple fact is that you wouldn’t be able to hire incredible team members and launch awesome products without the business success to back it up.
And without a certain level of business acumen, it’s hard to make a product that aligns well with the company’s business goals. The company strategy should also influence your Product Strategy, so it’s important to deeply understand what that company strategy is.
Understanding business goals is also a great way of understanding and empathizing with key stakeholders. Your CEO is a business person, and you need to know how to speak their language.
Interpersonal skills and people management
You’re leading a cross-functional team, and teams are made up of people. People are everything in Product.
It’s essential to build up solid interpersonal skills to deal with things like conflict resolution, team building, brainstorming sessions, alignment…all things that revolve around people being able to communicate and work together. Better people skills = better communication and relationships = more efficient and effective Product Development.
These aren’t skills you can learn through a bootcamp, or a webinar, or a book (or even a super awesome newsletter). Although these resources can certainly help you give you structure and insight into these skills, application is the only real way to learn. These are the ones you’ll have to hone over time by tapping into your instincts and learning from experience.
Don’t forget to check out some of the previous issues!
What is Your Product’s North Star?