Top 10 Product Management Superpowers

You can easily point out high quality code, high quality design, high quality marketing campaign. But can you easily spot high quality product management?

I would argue you can easily spot a few traits that give you a good indicator of product management quality. However, these traits are not binary (good or bad); instead, these traits are on a scale that can be improved over time & experience. As you develop these traits, you will grow your product management superpower.

Before we begin

There is no silver bullet here where one superpower would define a great product manager. Instead, there are a variety of superpowers that are engaged during different phases of product development cycle in order to lead a great time.

When you define the problem

Observant

As product managers, we are constantly being thrown with problems to solve — user complaints, stakeholder ideas, etc. Often times, the problems that people point out are symptoms.

A great product manager’s superpower here is the ability to identify common themes within the set of problems and diagnose root cause. As a result, team will be able to focus on knocking out one problem at a time and tackle multiple symptoms.

Rally a vision right for the team

There are endless problems to solve in any industry. I would argue that 99% of problems are distractions because any one team can realistically only focus on 1% of the problems at a single point in time. The key is to pick out which ones to solve that is right for the team to yield the biggest impact.

The superpower here is a product manager’s ability to pick out that needle in the haystack. They will identify the problem to focus on and tell a compelling story of what the world will look like if the problem is solved. As a result, the internal & external teams will be aligned and bring out the best work out of everyone on the team.

When you brainstorm ideas

Creative

More often than not, the first idea that comes to mind is not the best idea to solve the underlying problem at hand. The superpower here is the creative muscle to turn 1 idea into 100, constantly synthesizing learnings to create better solutions.

Collaborate

When you have the right team with the right combination of strengths, the possibilities are endless. This chemistry is most apparent in the brainstorming phase. It is here that you will notice the magic of variety and quality of ideas that can be brought out with collaboration in order to form the foundation of next phases.

The product manager with this superpower will be able to facilitate and bring out the best in people for the magic to multiply.

When you determine how to solve the problem

Turn opinions into facts

When choosing which solution to implement for solving a problem to achieve a given outcome, many people bring their opinions to the table and sometimes blindly trust their gut feeling. But the real superpower needed here is the ability to remain objective under the pressure to make decisions and challenge yourself to turn opinions into facts before committing too much resources.

How well grounded each opinion is with both quantitative and qualitative data before making a risky decision will determine the strength of this superpower. In this way, the product manager can assess each option objectively to make the best decision going forward.

Identify what matters

As a product manager, people come to you with many problems that often start as solution statements. This can range from people on your team, stakeholders, peers, users, friend, family, etc.

A great product manager’s superpower here is the ability to pinpoint what matters & dig into the why of each solution proposal. In this way, the product manager will help the team remain focused on the signal instead of chasing after the noise. This product sense superpower is often developed by keenly observing user behaviors, understanding where the market is going, and knowing the company level objectives to align with.

When you build a product

Speed to value

The more you ship, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the better your decision will be during future iterations. This cycle is a never ending compounding habit that will help any company grow their competitive advantage.

The superpower needed here is the ability to breakdown projects into components where each ticket has the smallest scope possible that can be shipped individually into production. In this way, each ticket can be brought into the real world in the shortest amount of time without depending on anything else.

The product manager’s ability to do this well will determine the team’s speed to value and speed of learning. The reverse here is you cannot ship until all the tickets are done and/or you are interdependent on external teams that have competing priorities, which in turn slows the learning cycle and speed to delivering value.

Clearly defined constraints

If we had no constraints, every car might be a rocket ship or floating vehicle. But that is not the world we live in. Every project, every team, every company, every industry has its constraints.

A product manager’s superpower needed here is the ability to clearly articulate the boundaries for the team. In this way, designers won’t design a product that can’t be implemented and hence resulting in frustration. Or engineers won’t spend a long time perfecting a feature that only solves a not so important problem and is rarely used. At the end of the day, defining what is in scope to be done is just as important as defining what is not in scope.

When you ship your product

Disciplined

It is easy to celebrate shipping new features and moving onto the next project immediately afterwards. The problem is: product development doesn’t stop right after you ship. Most of the learnings happen afterwards — confirming user research findings & hypothesis with in production user behavior data regarding the user’s actions. People often skip this step because of the unconscious fear of being wrong. You might find your original hypothesis disproven here, but I would argue it is better than not knowing you were wrong.

How disciplined you are at learning from the data after shipping the feature(s) is your superpower at this stage. By being disciplined here, you will make more educated guesses the next time you and your team is building/improving a feature. The learning effect here compounds over time and will enable you to make better decisions over time.

Maintain the big picture

It could be tempting to keep perfecting something. After all, the smarter your are and the more creative you are, you will always find ways to make improvements to a product. The art of knowing when to let go and move onto other opportunities is your superpower needed towards the end of the product development cycle.

Sometimes people give up too quick, sometime they give up too late. Over time, product managers will develop the superpower to keep their eyes on the big picture objective, goal, and outcomes. In this way, they will perfect the ability to make the right judgement call of what to work on next.

Wrapping up

These are only my thoughts. What are yours?