3 Essential Skills of Successful Product Managers
Let’s assume that you’ve landed a Product Manager role at a company with products that align with your level of technical skills. Perhaps you’ve been in this role for a while and things are going relatively well, but you have a nagging feeling that you could improve your practice.
You can’t quite put your finger on where precisely to make improvements. You’re constantly wondering what else you need to do to be successful.
After all, you’re the hub that connects many functions within a company together. Seth Godin calls this ambidextrous: “If you can be the person who coordinates the work of people regardless of their designated unasked-for affiliation, you’ll be able to find brilliant contributors that others foolishly overlook.”
The list of attributes and skills that Product Managers need to be effective is fairly exhaustive, but this blog is going to focus on three that can make a difference in a variety of settings.
1 - Relationship Management
A Product Manager has to be good at developing trusting relationships with customers and internal stakeholders. This is at the heart of developing empathy for users’ needs. Plus, it’s indispensable for translating user needs to engineering teams, etc.
Being adept at managing relationships with stakeholders, winning their trust, and fostering cross-functional synergy enables a Product Manager to keep the focus on the shared goals and build social capital.
The PM is both the shepherd and the sherpa of the product development process. Guarding the process so that product development stays on track and avoids dysfunction is essential. People are involved in all points of the process. They’re customers, engineers, supply chain managers, QA analysts, the sales team—you name it. The PM must guide and inspire these colleagues with integrity through product conception, development, and iteration.
It’s also important for a PM to fine-tune the relationship with the company’s CEO and other C-level leaders. How involved they want to be in the product process determines how to approach these relationships.
2 - Good Intuition
A Product Manager must have good intuition and apply it in many different ways. For instance, prioritization exists throughout the product lifecycle—from selecting features objectively to conflicts within teams to differences between customers and internal teams to balancing revenue goals to communications.
A PM who sees the big picture, rather than gets bogged down by the details, can navigate the team, stakeholders, and customers through any gray areas much more effectively. In addition, the PM with this skill can see connections between different ideas and events, and incorporate them into the product and/or process.
But avoid becoming arrogant or smug about intuition; it should improve over time. As a PM, you can do this through observation, active listening, experience, and continuous learning about all aspects of products—those your team develops and those you use on your own devices—and the talents of all members of your product team.
3 - Data Proficiency
A Product Manager must know how to read, deduce, and use data to make decisions. Data can guide decisions throughout the product lifecycle and in a variety of scenarios. So it’s necessary that a PM be “data-aware” as well as a trusted source for data analysis about products.
The ability to make data-guided decisions is particularly important at SaaS companies, where products generate data in and of themselves.
The type of data that needs to be analyzed can range from the observational product-centric to quantitative business financials. What is the product usage data? What is the data on pricing? What financial data can help determine resource allocation?
Now take some time to reflect on your PM practice to assess how you’re doing in these three skills areas. If you’re interested in seeing what other hard and soft skills are needed in a PM role, check out the BPMA website’s jobs page. It’s a good place to review the assortment of skills and backgrounds that area employers are looking for in today’s Product Management, Product Marketing, and UX Design professionals.
Kim Caisse has worked in content strategy and implementation, and recently transitioned to a workforce development role. As a volunteer with the BPMA blog team, Kim is collaborating to create informative, engaging content for the Product Management community.