The key Product 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 Product Skills area as defined in the Professional Product Management Framework. These Product 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 Product Skills of a Product person in more detail. The other competencies areas are discussed in separate articles, listed at the bottom of this article.
Product skills
The Product skills area consists of skills around business expertise, company strategy, enabling product strategy, product roadmaps, managing product requirements, achieving product-market-fit, goal-setting, requirements management, and general product knowledge, and product-domain knowledge.
Products are intended to solve customer, user, and business problems. Great POs/PMs create products that fundamentally achieve this goal. A problem-solving mindset is a key part of creating great products, and therefore the ability to identify, describe, prioritize, and solve the right problems is a critical product management competency. However, just identifying and prioritizing the right problems to solve is not where it ends. Product Owners/Managers also drive the product strategy, manage the product roadmap to achieve objectives, and seek to achieve product-market-fit, by developing the right product requirements. This is where product strategy comes in, which involves both short-term and long-term goals. POs/PMs often have to make quick decisions based on these objectives, using data and insights.
These skills are grouped into the following competencies:
Business Expertise & Company Strategy
A Product Manager should have solid understanding of the team-level product or service and the wider domain, including customer needs, market needs and competitor products. They create and clarify product strategy within their domain with guidance. They share knowledge and understanding of the product within the team.Enabling Product Strategy & Roadmapping
A Product Manager enables the creation, management and communication of product strategy at a team level. They support alignment of product strategy and roadmap tools, techniques and processes across teams.Managing Product Requirements to achieve Product-Market-Fit
A Product Manager has a solid understanding of the (customer) problems to be solved. They offer potential solutions and support to the domain in requirements identification, clarification, and communication. They have a track record of building product-market-fit features.
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.
