9 Essential Skills for Great Product Managers

Published in

Bootcamp

6 min readMay 16, 2022

A conductor who is conducting an orchestra behind a large crowd

Think for a second about the conductor of an orchestra. 🤔

“You would imagine a single person, making no noise at all apart from the odd breathy grunt and armed with just a sliver of wood, or sometimes just their hands and responsible for the sonic output of hundreds of instrument-wielding people.
In a more mundane way, we might think of conductors as the musical equivalent of sports team managers. You can’t quantify precisely what they do — but you know it when you see it.”

Sometimes a product manager is referred to as the conductor of an orchestra.

A product manager sits at the intersection of Business, technology and user experience.

Essential skills for a Great Product Manager

Learn to influence without authority

“You have to impose your will — not with a hammer, but you have to be able to convince people of your point of view,” says Pierre Boulez, another legendary composer-conductor.

You’re a team player who guides product development along its chartered course, but you have to do that without being the literal captain of the ship.

Here is a formula for building trust and influencing your team
Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy = Trust

Credibility: Being a subject matter expert in a topic, especially the product, customer and business domain.
Reliability: Being consistent so people can depend on you.
Intimacy: Connect with your team and be involved in their personal life.

When you’re credible, reliable and have developed intimacy with your team, you’d build trust and influence the team easily.

Ask why a lot!!

Many products fail because product teams focus on the WHAT and the HOW without first understanding the WHY. A product manager must be skilful in exploring the root cause of a problem before hopping to solutions. Simon Sinek explains why businesses should start why here.

Be the customer expert.

Pictures of 6 people of different races smilling — google.com

A product manager (PM) represents the customer's pains, gains and jobs to be done. A PM should understand the users’ needs and challenges and iteratively test solutions that solve the user’s problems failing to do this would lead to building products that solve no problem, and no one will use them.

Deep knowledge of data

Today, product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They are expected to have both quantitative skills as well as qualitative skills. Data helps you to achieve the following:

Influence your product decision; help your make data-driven decisions
Improve user experience; tracking data of your product funnels help you identify potential opportunities to improve user experience.
Influence without authority; the easiest way to influence your team is by using data to back up every decision
Tell a story; the best product managers are great storytellers, and data helps you tell a great story.

AARRR Pirate Metric framework is an acronym for five user-behaviour metrics that product-led businesses should track: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.

Acquisition (or awareness) — How are people discovering our product or company?
Activation — Are these people taking the actions we want them to
Retention — Are our activated users continuing to engage with the product?
Referral — Do users like the product enough to tell others about it
Revenue — Are our personas willing to pay for this product?

Read more on the Pirates Metric framework here

Know the Business:

Successful products are not only loved by your customers, but they work for your business. A great product manager deeply understands the business, how it works, and your product's role in your business. Key aspects of the business a PM should know about

Why the business exists; the vision, mission and objectives?
What product are we building?
Who are the customers?
Who is the competition?
What are the key metrics and KPIs?

Be a good communicator but a great listener.

A man placing his hand on his hand on the chin

Effective communicators listen well and listen intently. So many of us make the mistake of believing that being a good communicator only means that a person can articulate their thoughts and speak well. But, actively listening is just as, if not more, important when engaging with others, especially our customers.

Be an expert at product discovery.

A girl wearing a lab coat and holding chemical tubes

The goal of discovery is to validate our ideas in the fastest, cheapest way possible, a skill that every product manager must crave.

The most important questions to answer in discovery are as follows:

Will the customer buy this or choose to use it? (Value risk)
Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk)
Can we build it? (Feasibility risk)
Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)

In discovery, we address these risks by getting out of the building, talking to customers and testing our solutions iteratively.

Prioritize ruthlessly

A product manager must be able to focus on achieving long-term business goals. There are many exciting distractions in the form of bright and shiny features. Without focus, a product would fail to deliver value to the customer and would not meet business needs.

Empower your team to make their own decisions

In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability, and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by collaborating through intense experiments to discover a solution that works.

Books to get you started in product management

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love — by Marty Cagan

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses— by Eric Ries

Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value — Teresa Torres

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days — Jake Knapp

One-to-One Mentorship Program

For personalised product management mentorship, please fill out the form here.

What you’d get from my mentorship program

Hands-on product management classes
More personalised and hands-on training from a robust curriculum
One on One mentorship, I’ll share all of my experience as a product manager.
Build a product portfolio
CV and Linkedin profile optimisation
Lifelong access to the product management community
Secure your first or next product management role

Final Thoughts

A product manager helps to ensure that businesses build the right products, customers get value for their money, and developers invest their time building a product that would be successful in the market. Amongst all the skills a product manager should have, product discovery is the most important as this increases your chances of product success.

👋 Hi, Thank you for reading this article. I’m Oluwatobi. I build products and solve customer problems in tech companies. I write about my experience as a PM to help other product managers bring 10x value to their companies.