Key skills to becoming a great Product Manager
The swiss army knife of the job world.
It may sound obvious but this fact is often underestimated: building a great product is the most important thing a company can do. PMs are important because they happen to have the biggest impact on this (not the only impact; the organisation must be set up in a way to enable great product building as well – more to come on that another time).
Building a great product makes the rest of your business perform 10x better than they can with a bad product. It means Customer Support get 10x less frustrating queries, it means Sales and Marketing have a product that is 10x easier to promote and it means that the founder(s) or CEO will have a 10x bigger budget for their newest boat.
There are nearly an endless amount of skills needed to succeed as a PM; it’s not a clearly defined position and it can change company to company, even at different stages of the same company’s life.
However, there are certain skills that will help you become great regardless of the company or stage of lifecycle. Rather than being frameworks or mental models to bring into the role, these are the highest leverage skills you can work on if you’re looking to become a great PM (my opinion only, if it’s not obvious).
Be ridiculously good at communicating (written and verbal)
Not having these skills as a PM is akin to a batsman in cricket not having a solid defence – you’ll certainly have a chance to look good in the lower grades, but you’ll get found out very quickly at the top.
A PM is trying to build a vision of what the business will be like in 5 years, and also what’s going to happen to it over the next few weeks. You don’t just have to get your team excited (although this is priority one), you need to get everyone excited from marketing to the CEO to your potential customers. Being clear and concise is the only way you’ll ever leave an impression and get your product to land where you want it to.
There are other reasons though. Running user interviews, focus groups, selling the new product feature, communicating what needs to be built to engineers and designers, discovering what needs to be built with market research; doing these things extremely well all hinge on great communication (both written and verbal).
Learn rapidly
Product managing involves being an expert on your own product, the competition, the business and the market. This takes time. The PM that can increase the speed of this learning loop is going to have a significant advantage over others.
The quicker you learn about the market dynamics and your customers, the quicker you can come up with solutions. The quicker you get solutions in the hands of people to give you feedback, the quicker you learn the positives and negatives of the potential solution. You’re never going to get the solution right the first time you put something out there, so you need to be set to learn rapidly and iterate.
Be opinionated, but not an arsehole
Maybe this sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. You need to have strong views on the market, the product and trends. You also need to be humble enough to change your mind at the drop of a hat. A majority of people are too proud to do this, and they’re the ones that can’t succeed in this role (some might argue life).
Imagine you uncover some new information about an idea for a product change you’ve been campaigning around the office for months, and it makes it untenable. Will you have the modesty, yet confidence to tell everyone that this idea is no longer viable and at this stage, you don’t know what is?
Be great at discovering and uncovering information
An underrated skill in life these days is the ability to research topics in depth at great speed. This holds particularly true as a PM. A majority of things you start working on will be unknown to you and it’s absolutely your job to learn about it to an expert level. There is the internet that has information you need on any topic. There are people in your business and customers that no doubt have a great understanding of what you need to know. There are books, journals, academic research papers and a million other sources to look at.
But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to distill any information as quickly as possible, and ensure you’re the expert with you own insights.
Be comfortable handling unstructured situations
Being a PM is like The Amazing Race – you’ve got the end place to get to, and maybe a few tasks to do along the way, but how you get there and what you do to get there is completely up to you.
There is rarely a ‘right’ answer. In fact, in different situations there will be multiple right answers, and other situations won’t even have an answer. It’s your job to pick the best alternatives, relentlessly follow how they’re going, double down on what’s working and change quickly on what’s not.
But still be able to apply structure when it’s beneficial
Of course dealing with unstructured situations doesn’t mean throwing spaghetti at the wall every morning and hoping it sticks. There are frameworks and techniques you can (and should) use for many of the steps in getting to the outcome you need. But which of these you use, how, when and where – once again, that’s up to you.
Be creative
Yes, discovering the customer problem is the main focus early on in your time with the product. But in reality, you’ll learn the customer’s problem quite quickly and can keep in touch with it by spending ~10% of your week on it. The hard part is solving this problem. You’ll need to think creatively about plenty of possible solutions for this.
A PM doesn’t need to be a professional abstract artist, but being able to flex the creativity muscle will take you a long way.
Be able to build relationships with people of all levels within the company
You won’t have anyone reporting to you, but you’re expected to improve the most important thing in any business (the product, remember?). To be successful, you need to understand how everyone in the business fits in and see the business from their eyes.
You’ll also want everyone in the business to know who you are and what you’re doing. This isn’t to play politics, get further in the company and just generally be an obsequious little pr*ck. By doing this, you’ll get any relevant information that needs to come your way, you’ll get work done when you need it quicker and you’ll get better feedback when you go searching.
Be incredibly curious
The great PMs will always ask why to get to the core of the problem. The mediocre PMs will hear a problem and jump straight to a solution.
If this list of skills to work on were in order of importance, this would be in the top three for sure. To be an amazing PM, you really need an insatiable curiosity. This is the only way you’ll see things from a different perspective to others that will enable you to discover better solutions than would be possible.
Be at least somewhat computer literate
There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people in product who aren’t technical, but my opinion is you should have a decent computer science understanding.
I actually believe that everyone should learn how to code because it is a rigour that helps your thinking more than anything I’ve found. But if you’re working with engineers on a software product, it’s fair to say it will be beneficial to know roughly how it works.
So those are the highest leverage skills
These are skills I see as most important to a PM, as opposed to frameworks, mental models, techniques or things you should do in the job. Skills are the things you need to build to be successful in the long-term.
The good news with all of the above is that each one of them can be improved. The bad news is they are not something you’ll be dramatically improving overnight. I’m working on them frequently and will share in the future what I do, but I will say like any unstructured and complex problem, there is no quick hack to wake up tomorrow a 10x better PM.