Why are communication skills essential for the product manager role?
When we review all the material that has been written regarding the skills that a Product Manager should have, we usually find several that are common and indisputable: to have a holistic vision of the business, in-depth knowledge of their product and the product of the competitors, to know the market and alternative markets, to take ownership and be accountable for the product, to be data-driven in terms of value and impact, to be curious, to know how to simplify what’s complex, to focus on the big problems to solve, to build trusting relationships and to understand how to listen, to name a few.
Today, I will focus on what, in my opinion, is one of the most relevant skills: communication.
In the post “The Role of a Product Manager,” Michael Siliski says:
“You are the face of the product in the organization. People bring you questions, advice, and ideas. You represent and champion the team. You ensure that everyone — your manager, execs, ops, teams down the hallway — knows who you are, what your team is doing, and what impact your team is having. You build relationships that help the team get things done. You ensure the product’s story is told and understood, internally and externally. You create collateral, FAQs, docs, and presentations that can be leveraged by marketing, PR, sales/BD, executives, etc. If I ask five different people what you’re building and why I’ll get one answer.”
I especially like the last sentence because it is an excellent measure to understand how well the Product Manager is doing his/her job in this dimension.
From the core of the team, communication becomes a tool of enormous value for aligning its members both on daily issues and in strategic matters: from the contact in a daily or a retro to higher-level topics such as the company’s vision, its principles, and culture, the results, or the business’ leading indicators. The Product Manager must find the best way to provide visibility into how the team’s iterations contribute and add value to that vision and big goals.
For the communication to be effective (that is, to be entirely understood by the target public), the Product Manager must work on different variables: what artifacts will be designed to communicate; in terms of space and time, where and when it will be done; what cadences will be necessary; the vocabulary that will be used; the key concepts to highlight, and it will be required to open the space to listen to the team’s questions and comments to enrich the communication process in the future.
At the next level is the interaction with peers and with the rest of the product teams. Through formal and informal channels, the Product Manager’s role as a communicator is vital to achieving the desired impact. Likely, a single session, an email, a posting in the company’s collaborative tools, or a portfolio meeting is not enough, so it will be necessary to be very clear about what I want to communicate and the plan to do it.
Sometimes, no matter how much we are convinced that we made our presentation, meeting, or post, we realize that we could not make ourselves understood. We get angry with the audience instead answer questions such as: Where did I fail as a communicator? Did I use the indicated channels? Was I graphic, or did I use visually appealing resources to make myself understood? Did I take for understood concepts that the public did not necessarily understand? It is a process that we must do over and over again and at all levels. It will better ourselves, and we will be leaping in quality that will inevitably impact the product and our users.
If we talk about the Product Manager role’s communication skills, perhaps one of the most written topics is making communication with stakeholders more effective. An everyday example is when we communicate the roadmap of our product at the beginning of the year. The version of the roadmap that we build together with the team or share with the Head or Product Manager will undoubtedly be different from the one we will use with our stakeholders. It happens with roadmaps and many other elements, such as why we prioritize this or that feature, the impact we achieve with a change in the Payments API or the results of the interviews we did with users in the previous Quarter.
The feedback culture is yet another topic where the Product Manager must be an ambassador, disseminator, and example: in the 1:1s, in the retros, in the work sessions with the team, formally and informally, with regular surveys that give us information on this or that thing we need to work on and improve, team building activities, etc. These resources help the Product Manager, the team, the rest of the teams, the stakeholders, and the users, of course.
Returning to the words of Michael Siliski, “You ensure the product’s story is told, and understood, internally and externally.” In other words, the Product Manager, in addition to other things, is a storyteller; every day, he or she must find the best way, the most effective way, the right resources to tell and make sure that all have understood it. It is not an easy activity to tell stories; it is an art that is improved by listening to others do it, practicing, looking for examples, finding analogies to explain quickly, and make the story more memorable.
