Skills of Great Product Managers
People often ask me, “What do great product managers have in common?”. For those wondering what a Product Manager (PM) is or what they do, then check out this article. Great PMs have to be competent in many areas, but I’ll take you through the core skills required.
Empathy: It’s vital to have good empathy, so you can have a deep understanding of who you’re building products for. It’s not sufficient to just know your users — you need to understand their needs, desires and frustrations.
Communication: Most of the role involves talking to others. It’s not just about articulation, it’s also about being able to explain concepts in a simple way and communicate effectively to a range of audiences (e.g. to users, to leadership and to other teams). You should be concise and strive to always start with the most important information (i.e. starting with TLDR…).
Influence: You’ll need to convince others to take action regularly. For example, you may want to secure more headcount to grow your team, to start a partnership with another team or to influence businesses to start using your product.
Design Sense: You don’t have to be a designer or to be able to design super polished products. However, you need to differentiate between good and bad design, so you can maintain a high quality bar. You also need to be able to whiteboard ideas and make rough mocks.
Leadership: You need to lead your team without having authority over them. It’s important to make a solid long-term vision and maintain a good team culture. Good leaders take full ownership and accountability.
Execution: The best plans are only as good as their execution. It’s crucial to be persistent and determined despite challenges and blockers. You need to stay focused — prioritise, focus on a few things and don’t take on too much. …energy to stay with it. Say no.
Marketing: Being able to craft a compelling story of your product and its messaging, through blog posts, videos and presentations. You need to make people believe in your product as much as you do.
Product intuition: You need strong product intuition to make key decisions. The more experience you have launching products, the better your product intuition will be.
Strategic Thinking: It’s important to make a competitive landscape, outline future trends and figure out where your product sits within this.
Technical Understanding: It’s not necessary to have engineering skills, but it’s helpful to have at least a basic understanding. This way, you can better understand how the product works from a technical level and make tradeoffs that affect the product experience.
Analytical: You should be able to break problems down and remove ambiguity. You should also be data-driven, measure metrics and derive insights from data.
The exact skills needed to be a great PM is dependent on the company, the product and the seniority of the PM role.
Let me know if I’m missing any core skills and thanks for reading!
Originally published at http://alisarraf.com on November 14, 2023.
