What does it take to be a good Product Manager? This is a question that has troubled mankind for decades(maybe). Product Management as a domain is still evolving and is one of the few domains which has not yet been transformed into an exact science. You think of ‘Marketing’ and immediately Philip Kotler’s name comes to mind as a marketing leader. Investment enthusiasts have got a great deal to learn from Warren Buffett and his investment principles. Core tech world has got their Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg etc. But when it comes to Product Management, there is no general consensus on a ‘leader’ of the domain. And thus, there are no role models / benchmarks for aspiring Product Managers to follow and learn from. So, let’s discuss the top 10 Product Management skills that every Product Manager must be good at (in no specific order).
1. Storytelling
Storytelling is the most important product management skills and also probably the most overlooked one. A product is not just a bunch of features, it should be able to tell a story. It should be a story about how a certain problem has troubled the users for decades and how your product is going to solve that problem, thereby making a positive contribution to the users’ life.
Because the truth is, the customer doesn’t really care about your product, subconscioisly they are always evaluating “whether this product is worth my time and attention?”. And you are not gonna win them over by saying you have the best tech architecture, DB schema or by throwing stats at them. You have to connect with them at a personal/emotional level. Research also suggest that it is much easier for human brain to connect with a story and have a more memorable impact than just plain facts.
For e.g. – Facebook’s story is always somewhat about staying connected with your loved ones, about connecting you to the world and not about how easy it is to post an update or to upload an image through their app.
Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial was not about a computer, it was about a rebel rising against an oppressive giant (IBM).
2. User Experience (UX) / Design
User experience is one of the key components of your product. You should have complete clarity on how the user is going to interact with your product. What will be the user onboarding process, the transaction journey, the search and discovery experience etc.? Though the final prototypes will be created by the design team but the vision has to be your’s. You should be able to come up with first draft wireframes to clearly communicate to the design team how you plan the the user expereince to be.
Thorough competitive reasearch helps a lot in mastering this skill as it makes you aware of the different design practices followed across different platforms and helps you make an informed decision on what works and what doesn’t. Do regular brainstorming execises with your design team evaluating differnet platforms purely from a design perspective.
3. Strategic / Business Thinking
Your passion is your product but at the same time you must always remember that everything is about business. If your product is not contributing to the business growth of the company (directly or indirectly) then it is gonna die soon. Business alignment is an absolute must. Thus, as a produuct manager, you should be able to think from a business perspective and make sure your product drives a business goal.
For e.g. – If you generate your business from ad revenue like majority of the social media platforms, then you have to ensure that the browsing experience of your product is great and your product should focus on driving engagement on the platform. More the time spent on the product, more the ad revenue.
If your revenue stream is transactional like the ecommerce platforms, you should ensure that your product’s search & discovery experience is great and the transaction funnel is without any friction.
4. Research & Feedback
As a product manager you would come across various terms like Market research, competitive review, Product market fit, user feedback etc. All of these are just different ways of saying “research”. You should be good at collecting information from different sources and deriving meaningful insights from it. For eg – let say, your team wants to launch a subscription based system for your services. Before jumping into PRD and design discussions, you should try to figure out things like –
- What are the features of subscription services offered by competitors? Are they missing anything?,
- Talk to few users and understand the need for subscription services and the pain points it solves,
- What are the best and most commonly used payment methods for accepting payments for subscriptions?
- How easy or difficult it should be to cancel subscription? It may be at the cost of UX but some industries intentionally make it difficult (and at times even just offline) to cancel subsciptions. Remember, business alignment is a must.
5. Communication skills
If you know even the tiniest bit about Product Management then i don’t need to stress about the importance of communication skills. This is pretty much the bread and butter of a product manager.
Written Communication skills
A product manager has to properly document their vision of the product so that the team can work on the same. Doesn’t matter how beautifully you explain your product to the tech team, there is always going to be things which gets lost in translation. That is when the written documentation in the form of PRDs, user stories, JIRA tickets, meeting notes comes handy. You can’t keep answering each and every question yourself. That is just not humanly possible.
And also, you’ll have to create a lot of documents from time to time, some important and some useless. For e.g – GTM strategy, Roadmaps (3, 6, 12 months), Process flow documents, Tutorials, FAQs and even marketing collateral for your product. Your efficiency at written communication skills will decide whether it takes you few hours or few days/weeks to turn around these documents.
Verbal Communication skills
This ties more closely with the storytelling skill. As a product manager, you attend lots and lots of meetings and then you attend some more meetings. You’ll also conduct a lot of user interviews for research and feedback purposes. You have to absolutely master the art of verbal communication. You should be precise, on point and should be able to ask relevant questions from various stakeholders as well as clearly answer their questions.
6. Leadership / Stakeholder Management
Product Management is often referred to as “Leadership without any authority”. That is because, product managers have to interact with and influence multiple departments like tech, marketing, analytics, design without having any direct authority (or reporting structure) on these teams.
Also, let’s acknowledge that majority of the products that most of us work on are not using some out of the world rocket science technology. Purely from a technology perspective, there are plenty of competitors who have already done 80% or more of what we are trying to do. And thus, tech is usually the easy part, people are the ones that bring complexity. They like playing email email, they have to be “gently reminded” and somehow their phone battery dies as soon as they leave office.
Stakeholder management is one of the most important Product Management skills. You need to maintain a good rapport with multiple teams because eventually they are the ones who’ll execute your vision of the Product. You need to keep all these stakeholders motivated to work towards the common goal of product’s success. And for that, you have to earn their respect. Until you do that you can’t get anything done, doesn’t matter how high up you are in the corporate hierarchy.
7. Project Management / Prioritization
As famously quoted by Steve Jobs, “Ideas are worth nothing unless executed” and “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product”.
First, let’s be vey clear that Product management and Project management are two separate domains. However, as a Product manager, you can’t just say that your job is done when you defined the product, wrote the PRDs/user stories, created wireframes etc.. It is your job to make sure that the execution is also as per the plan. Irrespective of how big or small your company is, there will always be a tech bandwidth crunch. That’s just how it is. Your backlog will always have more items than what the tech team can efficiently deliver at any point of time. And you, as a product manager, should have a clear vision of which all products/features need to get build first and why.
Now, depending upon the organizational culture, you may have to do all or just a small part of project management. But, it is unavoidable.
8. Technical skills
Though you don’t need to be extremely hands on with the technical skills but since product managers spend a lot of time working with the tech team, having a high level understanding of the tech architecture of your product goes a long way. You should be aware of the basic tech lingo like APIs, database, backend, frontend, alpha testing, staging, prototypes, UAT etc. You can start by using some of the commonly used product management tools to build these skills.
9. Analytics
At a certain stage of product’s life cycle, product management is all about data. So product managers need to be good with the analytics/data about their product. What is your Daily Active Users(DAU), Monthly Active Users(MAU), User Churn, engagement metrics etc.? Data is how you’ll get to identify the finer feedback about your product. This will give you insights for transitioning your product from good to great and thereby achieving Product Delight.
10. Ownership
Ownership is an absolute must among the Product Management skills. You can’t really excel as a product manager if you don’t give your 110% to your product. A product manager must have a say, at least, in all the aspects of the product – marketing, analytics, tech, sales everything. You don’t need to be the final authority in all these domains ( and practically you can’t be) but you should make sure that you understand the logic behind these things and are an active participant in any process/activity that impacts your product. In our post about “What if the Avengers were Product Manager“, we ranked Captain America highest on the ownership front. That is where you got to be.
This list is in no way exhaustive and there are a lot more Product Management skills which are important. Let us know your most important product management skill in the comments or through our social media.