What it takes to succeed as a Product Manager?

Apr 02, 2020

Everyone, whosoever is interested in product management, must have read the famous article ‘Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager’ by Ben Horowitz. If not, then I will leave a link to that article in the ‘More readings and references’ section of this article. Now why I am bringing that up here is that it elaborately discusses what is that differentiates a good product manager from the ordinary one. To sum it up, good product managers always shoulder responsibilities, uphold the company’s vision, have great business acumen, bring all stakeholders together to build great products and are focused on delivering superior value to customers. Whereas, bad product managers are all about excuses, poor problem-solving skills, undisciplined, opinionated and rampant decision-makers. So, what the article tries to convey and what we will also discuss further in this article is that what are those essential ‘skills’ that helps product managers to stand out in their profession and succeed. Now, this is completely based on my experience, my learnings, and my understandings. Feel free to share your thoughts as well.

Fundamentally, we can divide the skills required for any professional into three categories: Technical Skills, Functional Skills, and Operational Skills. At the beginning of the career, professionals are more focused on acquiring technical skills followed by functional skills. Mid-career professionals are very skilled technically and focus more on mastering the functional skills plus building up operational skills. As they mature in the functional skillset and add strength to their operational skills they take a leap into the leadership positions. Let’s take an example to understand this more, a software engineer during the beginning of the career tries to build his/her grasp on programming languages (Java, Python, etc.). With career advancement, they build their functional skill set that is system design and architecture principles and finally as they graduate to the leadership position they master enterprise architecture, technology leadership, and people management skills.

However, product management has a slight deviation to this because most professionals enter into product management at a mid-career level from different backgrounds. Hence, they are expected to be proficient technically in their area of expertise (say engineering, business or design), competent functionally and sound operationally. Those Product Managers, who join fresh after an MBA or MS program, are usually put into rotational product management internship programs (like that of Facebook or Google), post which they start as associate product managers. These product managers at the associate level are also expected to learn fast and acquire the necessary competencies for them to graduate as Product managers. So, for product managers, the operational skills do make much of a difference as in how good they are at product management. For example, if you have joined as a product manager from software engineering background you would already be skilled in system design principles, you can quickly grasp the requirements management and prioritization techniques but what will be challenging for you is to lead different cross-functional teams without authority and get things done from them. So, let us discuss some of these key operational skills that can make a lot of difference in you as a product manager and help you succeed.

1. Influence

Influence is the culminated outcome and cyclical effect of five key behavioral characteristics that help product managers to build trust and earn respect from various stakeholders of software product organization, hence lead them progressively. These five key behavioral characteristics are: Listening, Understanding, Inspiring, Persuading, Leading. These behavioral characteristics are closely tied to each other. Good product managers are the ones who are great listeners. They listen to their team, their customers, and other stakeholders with who they have to work closely to build and ship the product. So, a lot of listening helps them to understand their needs, concerns, and challenges. Listening is different from just hearing. It is about making sense out of what the other person is saying in a more observant way, which helps in deriving insights out of other person’s statements. Hence, great listening leads to a good understanding. A good understanding of the needs and issues helps product managers to build trust and confidence with these stakeholders. The product manager speaks to them in their language, resonate with their thoughts. This, in turn, helps the product manager to inspire these stakeholders by creating a sense of purpose. Inspiration acts as a means to persuade them to align towards the product vision and strategic objectives and help the product manager to lead them in getting things done and achieving the product milestones.

2. Communication

After influence, I would consider ‘Communication’ as one key operational skill that helps good product managers stand out. First of all, let’s look at the host of information that product managers need to communicate. It can be as simple as a user story to as strategic as the product vision. In between you have customer insights, market intelligence, product narratives, functional and non-functional requirements, release information, metrics, and the list can go and on. All these have to be communicated to different stakeholders in a manner that it can be rightly assimilated by them. Hence product managers are expected to be great communicators to effect maximum collaboration from them. Communication has three key aspects: Oral Communication, Written Communication, and Visual Communication. Oral communication is the use of both verbal communication and non-verbal cues to clearly and crisply express thoughts, ideas, and information. Similarly, Written Communication is all about concisely delivering the information to the right audience in a contextual manner. In the case of both oral and written communication, product managers need emotional intelligence and a stronghold of language and style to communicate in the right tone.

Product managers are also involved in a lot of training, coaching and mentoring activities. They are required to impart product training, knowledge transition sessions, customer webinars, product roadshows and mentoring junior product managers. Visual communication works best in these sessions to aptly impart the required information. Visual Communication is the effective use of images, charts, infographics and interactive content to communicate meaningfully.

3. Product Thinking

Product thinking involves the application of both design and systems thinking to conceptualize a product solution. Product thinking involves a user-centered approach to design and define the product. It starts from understanding and framing the problem that the product will solve for its users and then goes into the design and define a product that can help users achieve their goals in a very directed and coherent manner. As a product manager, you think in terms of a product as a whole and not as a bunch of systems that interact with one another.

Product thinking is at the core of product management craft that defines great product managers. Good product managers first understand the problem and its underlying issues. They then apply design thinking to creatively come up with ideas or concepts that can possibly solve the problem. These ideas or concepts are validated and tested by asking the right questions with vetted assumptions. Once an idea is validated then product managers apply systems thinking to define a scalable set of system components, their associated behaviors, and interactions. Though it involves both technical and functional skills, holistically one needs to be operationally sound at this to design a great product.

4. Customer Advocacy

Product managers are the voice of the customers in the software product organization. They wear customers’ hat during the product discovery and play the role of customers’ representative while working with the engineering team during the development of the product. Hence, customer advocacy is an integral operative of the product manager. Customer Advocacy is the ability to understand and empathize with customers to understand their needs, their problems and their challenges to be able to be their voice throughout the product life cycle. This helps in building products that are great in terms of user experience and usability. In turn, it is well received by the market, gets a good adoption rate and leapfrogs the product business.

5. Product Leadership

Product Leadership is all about leading the product organization towards the product vision and closer to the company’s business objectives. Product Leadership is very different from the other organizational leadership areas because product managers lead without authority. Product leadership relies heavily on having good emotional intelligence and intricate people skills. This is required to tackle different stakeholders by helping them understand the desired future state and show them the associated mutual interests so that there are less resistance and more collaboration. Product leadership brings everyone together, motivates them to work together to achieve product goals and objectives. Product managers are required to facilitate and lead discussions, smartly resolve conflict, and take apt decisions especially during the times of deadlock. This also helps them to earn the required respect which is much needed for them to lead the product in the appropriate direction.

A great product leader is the one who makes stars align, who makes things happen, who plays both the role of a Rockstar as well as a Servant Leader, all this to build and ship a great product. And, to that, these 5 skills according to me makes a lot of difference and helps the product manager stand out. Hope this makes sense. Let me know what you think.

Happy building classy products!

Rationality.IN

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