The 3 most important skills for new Product Managers
I analyzed 40+ tips given by 15 PMs to figure out the most important skills a PM needs to develop.
Introduction: the path to improving in product management 🗺
Any PM knows that improving on the job can be a struggle. Indeed, it’s easy to get lost in the many areas of product management: project planning, communication, product vision, product roadmap, prioritization, user research, UX, agile and lean methodologies… (For someone easily bored at work, it’s definitely a great role!)
A classic approach to improvement includes, among others, regular feedback sessions with colleagues, adopting what other PMs in your company do well, finding inspiration in podcasts or articles etc. Feedback and mirroring other PMs are great for short term improvement, while digging podcasts and articles can be great for long term improvement and inspiration.
Yet, the journey to acquiring deep knowledge and maturity on product management is unclear. As Junior PMs, we are left with questions like:
What’s the fastest way to improve as a PM? What key skills should I spend time focusing on?
While pondering on it, I figured out I would probably not find the answers by myself. So I did what every lazy person would do in this situation. I created a Google Form and reached out to my peers with a simple question:
What 3 tips would you give to a new PM?
The results were quite surprising. People got inspired. They were quick to share their learnings with me and eager to know what secret tips their colleagues gave.
Below I share the answers from this survey, along my interpretations based on the patterns I noticed from the data.
At Doctolib, we are 60 PMs working in 3 countries, in one of the fastest growing healthcare Tech firms in Europe.
Results: key areas to focus on as a Product Manager
After collecting the 40+ tips and grouping them into themes, a surprising pattern emerged:
🥇 3 core PM competencies
- Self efficiency
- Collaborative mindset
- User-first
These 3 themes are the most frequent among the tips. They span across the entire spectrum of PM seniority, from junior PM (1+ years of experience) to Product Director (10 years of experience). It certainly means that they’re at the center of the role and career track of the PM. Something I interpret as:
As a PM, your success in the role will correlate with the time you invest in these 3 areas
🥈 Other PM competencies
Junior and Senior PMs also insist on acquiring other skills such as project planning, empathy, feature team’s mission definition, growth mindset (failing is learning), internal communication, quality assurance. Acquiring these skills is a challenge that a new PM must overcome. However, these skills aren’t at the center of a career in product management.
Our Product Director and Lead PMs (>5 years of experience) value additional areas: impact-driven mindset (vs ‘feature-shipper mindset’), lean mindset, solution design and problem framing. These are probably stuff you start thinking after a few years of experience. They’re visionary and advanced, probably too advanced for new PMs.
If we wrap it all briefly:
- 3 core competencies to develop quickly and that you’ll hone throughout your entire career: self efficiency, collaborative mindset and user-first
- Other competencies that will reflect the different stages of your maturity as a PM: from empathy, mission definition, growth mindset, internal communication to impact-driven and lean mindsets, problem framing and solution design
As we aim to understand the “fast track” for PM, deep-diving on the 3 core competencies is foundational. Let’s see what they’re made of.
3 core competencies: self efficiency, collaborative mindset, user-first mindset
Looking at them in depth, the 3 core themes can be decomposed into sub themes.
I share below the tips from the survey in these 3 categories. I think these tips are more impactful in their current form—in the way they were written, raw and blunt—rather than summarized in a paragraph.
Theme #1: Self efficiency
Organisation & time management
“Develop extreme rigor for always maintaining up-to-date Sprint / Tickets / Roadmap”
“Organise your week & prio: define investment on a weekly basis on what you need to achieve. Discovery? scoping? QA [Quality Assessment]?”
“Always challenge what you are spending your time on. Is it the highest prio item at that point? If not, don’t be scared to switch gears.”
“Keep an active to-do list and review it daily (or even multiple times per day)”
“Respect your focus time. Most of our topics are now complex (environment, problem or both) and need deep analysis and at the same time, it is really easy to be always in meetings”
Knowing your product
“Test your product, your features, take time to try different workflows, what you don’t know, if things go wrong.”
“Know your Product. Test your product inside out, read documentation”
“Use the product, use the product, use the product to know it inside out from a functional standpoint”
“Ask an engineer of your team to walk you through the tech stack and the key components (models, views, controllers, database schema) of the part of the product you will work on”
Taking responsibility / ownership
“NEVER change your strategy /decisions right after a meeting, a feedback session, etc… a PM needs to take time to think and not change his/her mind every day”
“Learn to say “no”. You have the right to say no to a request, to a last-minute change, to a meeting, to a stakeholder.”
“Make your own decisions, you are the one who decide. It is something I don’t master at at all but I think it is not good to take advice from everybody and change your decision directly. Take the advice, feedbacks, take the time to process them and make your decision”
Learning tools & tricks
“Do not use your mouse, learn every shortcut you can in GSuite, Mac/Windows, and applications. Also take notes of everything, somewhere where it’s easy to search and find your previous notes (I use Evernote)”
“Know you tools. Set up and test all tools (JIRA and the likes) that will be useful to you!”
Theme #2: Collaborative mindset
Involve others in the process
“Socialise your feature. You may be the PM, the best features will always be the ones designed with all different stakeholders: developers, designers, marketing, legal. Co-build your product specifications.”
“Implement cross team spec review with your domain [a group of feature teams at Doctolib that work on the same product], with other domain. It will nurture your specs and avoid blind spots or missing specific use cases”
“Listen to your team, they have often good reasons to be skeptical, or they often have good insight.”
“Share what you’re thinking with other PM, designers, engineers. Challenge your ideas. Others will often have great suggestions that are better than your initial ideas.”
“Build your feature with your team and make them as owner as you are…. You can’t build a feature by yourself. When all of the people are together to create a feature you have great results”
“Give room to developers in the product development process, but challenge them on their solutions”
Make allies
“Find your key stakeholders and people that you can leverage to do your job well (knowledge or skills you don’t have, relations with customers etc) and define how to best work with them.”
“Meet key people. With remote, communication is paramount and you need to know who talk to whatever your question”
“Do not wait for answers in usual process if you want to move fast (IT, secu, data analysts, etc). If you need something done, find buddies in every team and contact them directly.”
Theme #3: Be user first
Constantly talk to your users to learn
“Talk to your users. Book slots in your agenda to spend time talking to them. Their insights are priceless.”
“User first: Go on the field to face real condition. Don’t hesitate to go behind users and watch them work. Always use five “why” methodology for perfect understanding of the primary needs”
“Listen A LOT OF calls if possible with direct clients -> you need to understand your users and their problems . * do not delegate : you need to get your own intuition”
“Talk to users, do not be afraid to call them, ask all your questions, you’ll learn a lot and will be more passionate to solve problems that real people have :)”
“User first: talk to them as often as possible. Take time to sit with them and look around.”
“Be close to users. We make products for them so they have the answers not you.”
“Talk to users. A lot. Learn about NIHITO, and try to apply it as much as possible.”
Conclusion
As you are seeking progress throughout your career as a PM, 3 core competencies should be your main focus:
- Self efficiency — Organisation & time management; Know your product; Take responsibility / ownership; Learn tools & tricks
- Collaborative mindset—Involve others in the process; Make allies
- User-first—talk to your users to learn
This should help you derive a list of actions to take on a regular basis, in order to improve at a fast pace, in the right direction.
As an example, here’s my list of actions I designed based on this analysis.
Action items I created for myself, based on this analysis
Self efficiency
- dedicate a time slot weekly to organise and review my and my team’s priorities (short, medium and long term) — 30-min Monday morning
- dedicate a time slot weekly to learn tools & tricks — 15-min on Tuesday morning
- dedicate a time slot weekly to test the product in depth—30-min on Friday
Collaborative mindset
- start over-communicating what I’m doing and actively involve people in the solution finding process—once I have investigated the user problem in depth, organise 1 meeting with my feature team, 1 meeting with PMs, 1 meeting with others (marketing, sales…) to share insights and brainstorm solution.
- Try to have more empathy, ask the people I’ve worked with for feedbacks on a quarterly basis
User-first
When not involved in a user research, I will:
- dedicate time slots weekly for talking to my users — anticipate each week to join 2 to 3 calls with customers (we have what we call D15 = “day 15” which is a call with the customer 15 days after purchase)
- be the note taker for 1 call of user research that is led by one of my fellow PMs every week
Last but not least
In the coming weeks, I’m also really happy to involve my peers to write articles on product management skills and how we continuously improve on them at Doctolib.
Subscribe to https://medium.com/doctolib and stay tuned for more articles like this 📻.
Thanks for reading! Hope it helps 😃
