The key Leadership Skills for a Product Owner, Manager, and Leader
A frequently asked question from Product Owners and Product Managers in the field is: “What are the most important skills for a Product Owner/ Product Manager?” Some of the best Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders we have worked with have mastered the core Professional Product Management competencies, as discussed in this article. Many of them however, have also mastered the Leadership Skills area as defined in the Professional Product Management Framework. These Leadership Skills will be discussed in this article in more detail. But first, let me introduce you to the Professional Product Management Framework to position these core skills.
The Professional Product Management (PPM) Competency Framework covers the product management skills and competencies that you may need to develop. This framework is used by organizations to hire, develop and retain treir product professionals. It is a comprehensive framework that allows to be tailored to an organization’s specific needs.
We’ve learned that at the core of professional product management it is all about Communication and Entrepreneurship. Product Managers create value by seeking out new opportunities, by finding problems worth solving and communicating that to the rest of the organisation. The other six areas that product managers need to master are Leadership skills, Product skills, People skills, Process skills, Business skills, and Market skills.
In this article, we’ll explore the Leadership Skills of a Product person in more detail. The other competencies areas are discussed in separate articles, listed at the bottom of this article.
Leadership skills
Great Product Managers have great leadership skills. They possess skills around advocating the product, they are contributors to building a strong culture and sense of togetherness in the team. They are also able to support and develop others, to lead people and teams, and to communicate vision and goals effectively through storytelling for example.
Product Owners/Managers own the product vision, strategy, and goals, which need to be evangelized throughout the organization. The overall direction of the product needs to be communicated consistently and frequently to ensure that everyone is aligned. This communication often needs to be tailored to the audience, and storytelling is often a big part of this effort. It is hard to overcommunicate the product direction. Product Owners/Managers often believe that the vision and strategy are clear to everyone, but for the rest of the organization, it is often not so. POs/PMs need to remind them of the vision, strategy and goals again and again, so that decisions are made with the product direction in mind.
Although owning and setting the product direction is a very important and visible responsibility of POs/PMs, building the product team is equally important. Building a team starts with hiring the right people. Once hired, new team members need to be onboarded. Product Owners/Managers need to spend sufficient time providing context about the product and its direction, explaining the processes and tools, and outlining the organizational context and the culture of the team.
An important responsibility for Product Leaders, is also to develop the product team and/or their peers in Product Management. This could start with setting clear expectations what is expected of each team member. It could range all the way to creating formal role descriptions, a career ladder that describes required competencies for each level of seniority, or creating an agreement between leadership and team member. In addition to these expectations, career development goals should be agreed with each team member, based on the needs of the company but also based on the interests of the individual.
Another important leadership skill relates to establishing the right culture. A PO/PM/PL obviously can’t change the company culture single-handedly, but they surely have an important role to play. They can empower the cross-functional product teams to discover and deliver solutions to customer problems. They can support in the acceptance of failures, and stimulate people to obtain feedback and learn. They can stimulate taking ownership of problems and let people self-manage and resolve them for example. Most importantly though, these product leaders should be role modelling the expected behaviour, providing feedback, and praising desirable behaviour that the team members display.
These skills are grouped into the following competencies:
Advocacy
Great Product Managers effectively advocate for their immediate peers and those around them. They actively promote their product or service amongst internal and/or external stakeholders, users and (potential) customers. They have a leading role in the adoption of the product or service.Culture & Togetherness
Great Product Managers actively signal behaviour they want to see, in line with company values and principles. They keep a cool head around others even in stressful situations. They support in the planning and organising of team activities.Developing Others
Great Product Managers are able to recognise the strengths of peers, and look for ways to support those strengths through the work. They invest time in materials or process to support team growth. Peers see them as an informal coach.Envisioning & Storytelling
Great Product Managers are confident in leading initiatives and groups to define and sell a coherent medium to long term vision, with clear strategic goals and short term goals to get there. They build the team(s) as a focus for wider company vision and strategy.Influencing, Politics & Stakeholder Engagement
Great Product Managers are able to proactively inform and collaborate with stakeholders both within and outside their organisation with pertinent and timely information, including bad news. They are able to read and adapt to personalities across the organisation. They have good (working) relationships with all key stakeholders.People & Team Leadership
Product Managers who have a people leadership position (e.g. Group Product Manager, or Head of Product) are capable of managing interns, a team, contractors, suppliers and/or agencies. They possibly manage a couple of junior team members. They don’t look for glory, and don’t complain about boring work. They assume good decisions in other’s work and broadly does what they say they’re going to do. Product managers who don’t have direct reports still show the right people leadership for their teams.
Want to learn about the other Professional Product Management Competency Areas?
The following articles discuss the other Competency Areas from the Professional Product Management Framework in more detail:
Excited to move your Product Management skills forward?
Becoming an expert in a field takes more than a single course. It is more like a journey, requiring knowledge gathering and experience in practice. That is why we have developed Product Management Learning Journeys for Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders.
If you want to use a structured approach to boost just those skills that you need to improve in order to take the next step in your career, then consider our Professional Product Management Training Modules. Modules like Value Maximization, Envisioning & Storytelling, Strategy & Roadmapping, or Stakeholder Engagement & Politics provide you with 8+ week learning and development tracks, allowing you to really improve a specific area of competence, instead of going through a very generic course that covers all kinds of different topics on a high-abstraction level.
Our learning journeys are designed to find the perfect balance between the theory from university with the intensity of a bootcamp. These ingredients are blended into a training format that fits anyone’s preferred style of learning. We teach you enough theory to know when you’re playing with fire, but we focus on applicability for the job to be done.
The journeys offer a personalized approach for professionals to grow their capabilities and to advance their careers. The blended learning journeys around product management consist of (competency) assessments, trainings, workshops, exercises, on-demand content, personal reflection, coaching, and consultancy.
The foundation of the product management journey is formed by the PPM framework. It’s connected to your product career framework and is implemented throughout the whole learning journey.
Want to get started? Take a moment to explore our website, learn more about our approach to Product Management, or schedule a chat about how we can help you, your team, or company to move forward.
