What makes a great Product Manager
As I work on productboard, I get asked this question a lot. Either because you folks are hiring more product managers or because you want to get better at product management yourselfs.
The Problem — Solution card
I see product management as a union between problems and solutions. Think about it as a card. One side is a Problem, the other is a Solution. They are inseparable. Something like this:
Read the problem side and flip the card to find out HOW to solve it, read the solution side and make sure you understand WHY the solution matters in the first place. Now your job as a Product Manager is to fill out this card, or actually many cards, and then choose the ones you will play your game with.
Understand the Problem
The Problem side represents the understanding of people and their problems — a great PM is like a detective who can really identify the most pressing problems of people (or needs, or jobs-to-be-done, or pains… pick your favorite framework, it doesn’t matter). As Wells Riley of Envoy beautifully pointed out, this is what designers are typically very good at, they excel at user research and thus have a leg up when transitioning to product management.
There is one big difference between product management and pure design though — product managers need to not only understand the problems of individual users, they also need to understand how many of such users are in the market. For example, whereas designers can design the best product for a single user and win a red dot award, product managers need to be sure that the users they design for, represent a market big enough to sustain a profitable business.
Thus, on the problem side the critical skills of a PM are curiosity and empathy, but also ability to spot trends and patterns that help with broader market understanding and business viability. A PM needs to be a great listener, someone who digs really deep into motivations and emotions, and at the same time is comfortable with data and numbers to figure out market and business opportunity sizing.
Discover the Solution
That would be for the problem side of the card. On the solution side, PMs need to understand the solution alternatives available on the market now and how well the alternatives satisfy the end users’ problems. This helps PMs identify opportunities to tackle.
Great PMs have a deep understanding of the problems they are after and available solution alternatives. Only then can they align designers and engineering colleagues to come up with the best solutions, come up with the most amazing products.
Great PMs aren’t necessarily the best designers and engineers themselves, but they do have deep appreciation and understanding of great design and they master technology to understand feasibility constraints. Think of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and later Jony Ive. Steve was an exemplary product manager with deep understanding of the problems and needs of people. He had a deep sense of design and technology, but he wasn’t necessarily the one coming up with all the design and engineering ideas. It was Steve’s ability to see and feel a new product with eyes and hands of the future users, that made him an exceptional product manager. He was unprecedented in recognizing mediocrity from greatness.
So there you have it, it looks like a PM needs to be a universal being who embodies market and user understanding, design, and technology. And yes, the best product managers are such rare breed. In reality you might have one person who is more problem-focused and who needs to be complemented on the solution side, or vice versa. Especially as your organization grows specialization is more likely. That is fine, just make sure the people work closely together, communicate really well and have covered both problem and solution side of the card.
This brings me to the last point I want to make, and that is the importance of communication and leadership skills.
Lead the team
What I described so far is all inward facing — PMs understanding problems and solution possibilities. And indeed, if you want to be a great PM you must take it all in, but you must also excel in communicating it all out. You can’t be the “know it all” who just tells others what to do. You need to expose problems, make sure that everyone understands them, that everyone has the full context. You must achieve full transparency around why the focus is A and not B. You are in charge of creating transparency around the problem side of the card, and by doing so you create environment where everyone can contribute ideas and suggestions for better solutions.
The really great PMs are confident, but they also admit that they don’t have every answer. Being honest and exposing a weakness is the foundation of building a great team based on trust. That is what makes not just a great product manager, but a real product leader.
What do you think?
Hubert
