Product managers should have the mixture of soft skills, technical skills, & domain specific skills. However unlike Accounting, software development, Doctor, there is no educational path where you will learn these skills which is required to become Product manager.
In this Article, We will highlight some important skills in each area and how you can utilize them as a product manager. Let’s start with what is the product management in real world.
What actually Product Managers do?
On higher level, product managers are mainly responsible for building and getting products to the market. They make sure Developers, Management, & other stakeholders all moving the product forward without compromising the quality.
In IT companies, product managers are basically responsible for:
- Determining which features to build near further on the basis of what they understand from clients, internal stakeholders, market research, user testing, & past experiments
- Planning when and how to build product features basis on available priorities and available human & financial resources.
- Ensuring the development team is getting its work done within the timeline.
- Gathering & analyzing data to understand how good the product is doing in the market
- Communicating progress and publishing any major blockers to upper management
We will focus on Agile methodology & software development in this article, but product management is not limited to software & tech. You will find PMs in retail, real estate, logistics, finance, and healthcare using Six Sigma, Waterfall, and other methodologies.
You might have already aware that the product we say here in product management is not only company sells online or in any store. It may also be the operations, accounting, sales, & development tools or the processes.
For example,
- An account management team uses a custom Salesforce plugin to improve client experience, That is a product.
- A factory relies on an assembly technique or a special machine, those are products.
Technical Skills
Product managers define the the product direction, how team will build it. which needs technical planning, Analyzing and prioritization skills:
Requirements Gathering
This is the most important skill for a product manager for gathering the client expectation and then converting those information into requirements for the developers who will be developing the same product.
To achieve this, The product manager will need to talk to management team, clients, SMEs(Subject Matter Expert) and Users. This includes presenting open-ended queries about the problem they are facing currently and the goals they need to achieve, Queries like:
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- Why do you need to add new users?
- How do you do that right now? & How often?
- What is your expected scenario?
- How & Where is this data used?
Instead of focus on defining the acceptance criteria basis of gathering requirements, Product Managers should focus on determining how the product feature must work and how to handle exceptions, in case occurs any.
Implementation Planning and Sprint Management
After finalizing the path of your product, you need to develop it. However there is a process to before we reach the development of a product. We can not just align some developers to develop the product so that account departments can pull up the client’s account information, check the past transactions, and move money. No, This is something which will never be the case, anywhere.
Product managers need to divide the complex problems with many workable tasks or subtasks. Each and every tasks/subtasks should be classified in a prioritized sequence, so that they can be tracked provided the availability of limited resources.
In Agile methodology, Teams work for 1-2 week duration that is known as sprints.
It is the product manager’s responsibility to finalize which tasks will be part of the sprint and how and who will tackle each tasks. Most of the IT companies uses tools like JIRA or Trello to manage the sprints, so if you want to become a Product manager, then you will have to be familiar with these kinds of sprint management tools.
Sometime even with a planned sprint, there are last-minute issues like, Software bugs, service outages, adhoc leaves, delivery delays, etc. It is product manager’s responsibility to re-prioritize the sprint and reallign team’s resources to get things done on priority basis.
As with these skills, it is important to practice these skills in order to develop and expertise in them. You need to learn about requirements gathering, implementation planning, and sprint management by considering small features like full-scale products.
For example, if You are assigned with an application page functionality change, You will have to connect to marketing & client to get all the reasons on why we need this change. You will have to write up a detailed set of tickets called story, with proper details of what you needed to do and connect about them with aligned developers about how to approach them. Finally, Move the ticket across the Developers and Testing phases until the feature gets deployed. It is a great practice.
Specific Tool Skills
As a product manager, You should have some basic understanding with your team’s technical stack to plan properly & communicate effectively with developers. You have to be at least familiar on high level with the tools your company and team uses. You don’t need to know exactly how SQL or Oracle works, but you should know that they both are database management system.
Soft Skills
As a product manager, you don’t manage people, your are not their reporting manager and you are not responsible for thier appraisal. However you are responsible to ensure the team delivers the final product within the timeline and as per the requirements.
That means, you are not in charge, but you are accountable. So need to motivate and help the team succeed as a colleague instead as a manager. Below are some of the skills needed for the same.
Selflessness
Product build time is limited & expensive. Your team come first, so you have to become proficient at preserving their time, even when it takes sacrificing your own time. To keep the project on track and reduce the amount of time team spend switching the ad-hoc tasks, you should look for the ways to avoid disturbance, That means intercepting bug reports, taking inbound calls, writing SQL queries, and ad-hoc requests from colleagues, and whatever it takes to keep them in the serious work environment.
It extends beyond preserving your team’s schedules. It is also about individual accomplishments & highlighting team while taking responsibility for any failures. If any team member feel unappreciated or unrecognized, they will leave. Give credit to your team & Be humble.
Communication and Empathy
Being a project manager you interact with people from all other departments, so you can analyze the problems from every point of view & discuss with people in various roles. this is why we say, Product management is a cross functional role.
While you are dealing with requirement gathering and 2 weeks sprints, your CTO, CEO, sales and marketing team may not execute in the same cycle, objectives, or assumptions. The better you understand your team members work cycles, goals, the better you will be able to communicate with them, prioritize their exepctation, and motivate them to stay involved.
Suppose, A Sales team member may come to you with his/her frustrations about the feature they were expecting that is not exist in the system. You need to be able to understand with their viewpoint, understand what is he/she asking for & why, and communicate the solution it would entail and potentially, why it will take more time and can not be done right away.
As a product manager you also have to understand with your developers. Not every product is exciting and has success story. Sometimes you will find yourself developing boring however necessary and useful products.
For example, You may have to work on a C++ project until next quarter for developing a billing portal. It is little difficult situation to manage team mate who is not interested in this type of technology, however You will have to see a diplomatic way of doing it without compromising their enthusiasm.
Finally, if you’re working with a distributed or global team, you should pay extra attention to how you communicate as a Product Manager. When asking questions, You should provide as much context as you can or make notes for teammates to avoid misunderstandings and delays.
Curiosity
Being a Product manager You should always think about what’s next. Successful products never gets finished; they expand. That means you can not sit ideal once you have delivered version 1.0.
Curiosity will let you to learn what your product is doing right and where there is any opportunities for further improvement. Track competitors, talk to clients, users, and other stakeholders on a regular interval. Check out competitor’s products. Follow investor and entrepreneur, understand new technologies/apps whenever you get the opportunity.
Domain-Specific Skills
Other than the management & technical skills, Product managers need to consider the domain they are dealing in. You don’t have to be pro at the beginning itself, However the more you will understand about your business, the better decisions you will be able to make.
If you dealing with products that require consumer marketing or advertising or consumer facing products,
like, you will be asked to execute tests & classified the results. Data visualization & Analysis, skills are very important, so you may have to explore knowledge in statistics, analytics, data science, Excel.
If you work on health or food and beauty products, you should be familiar with regulations and safety measures.
If you work in education or healthcare domain, you should probably need to know some of the laws & regulations to avoid legal issues or financial mistakes – specially related to data privacy.
The tools or software you use might also vary depending on your industry or sector you are working in, & you should be comfortable using the appropriate tools and software depend on what kind of Product manager role you go after.
Showcase your Product Management Skills during your job search
Product managers are determined by the success of products & teams. Requirements gathering, sprint management, breaking down activities into multiple tiny tasks, Ensuring complex problems resolution, specially blockers. Eventually, you need to present how your skills and work led to a fruitful result.
Some Employer look for evidence that applicants can clearly communicate their process for prioritizing and resolving solutions. Achievements should be part of your resume, which should include success metrics clearly.
For example, did your work was beneficial to your company financially last year? Make sure you put that achievements in your resume at the top in bullet points.
Here’s are some sample statements:
- Migrated two business units to new in-house CMS, Saved around $9M in operations & infrastructure costs in year 2021
- executed onboarding improvements with increase in customer registration by 90%
Mention the situations in your resume where you used management, technical, and industry specific skills to run the overall sprint team:
- Have written yearly proposals & whitepapers for new AI featured product development
- Managed new product development including off-shore & on-shore staff, and third-party vendor’s facilities
Also highlight the teams you have worked with. Communication with the senior executives like CEO and CTO shows trustworthiness & authority. Cross functional job convey your abilities to build agreement and shows your proper communication with non-technical people as well. For example, you can mention:
- Provided Daily, weekly and Monthly progress reports to the leadership team & CEO about product status, impediments if any, and client’s feedback
- Managed a team of five product managers, by managing mobile & web verticals
In interviews, be ready to explain in detail what you have mentioned in your resume, that will show how you have utilized your skills. Ensure you have background stories in the interview call which demonstrate your interpersonal, technical, & domain specific skills.
Highlights
A Succesfull product manager listen to inputs and ideas and consilidate them in order to create compatible & actionable product plans. However, Product managers are also not too valuable about their plans, they are flexible and they adapt easily, as situation demand.
Being a product manager, you can not talk to all the clients. You can not find all bugs. You can not fix the issues or you can not test evey functionality of the product. However, you will definitly be measured by how well your team did and afcourse by the ultimate success of delivered product.
If you know your product perfectly, and you communicate effectively to non-technical & technical stakeholders, and you always stay organized, you are the winner of the Project Manager journey.
All the BEST! We hope this article would be helpful for you.