Qualities of a Product Manager
🎯 This is an excerpt from the udemy course “Great Product Manager: Product Management by Microsoft’s PM”
So going through the course there are 8 important skills or qualities that a PM needs to inculcate in their life. I feel these skills are not just required for the post of a PM but also play a very big role in any human’s life. So let us understand them and how we can inculcate them in us.
- BEING DATA-ORIENTED:
‣ It is one of the core values.
‣ Before taking any decisions, the situation must be looked at from a data-driven perspective eg: counting to your statistic values to see how much your product is used by the users, how many orders are placed per day, etc. This helps to bring a strong foundation on which our decisions are taken and minimize the chances of taking a wrong decision.
‣ The scientific method must be used, according to Francis Bacon a scientific method is defined as “ Principal and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of the problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypothesis. ”
‣ There are seven modern scientific steps that one needs to take in order to understand the data behind the decisions being taken. These steps prevent you from taking poor rash decisions. They are as follows:
- Question — that thing that you want to know
- Research — conduct research
- Hypothesis — Educated guess or prediction of the outcome experiment
- Experiment — Test the hypothesis
- Observations — Data you collect during the experiment
- Results/Conclusion
- Communicate
2. HUMBLENESS:
‣ This just means to deal with facts and not with charm.
‣ Let us say for eg: I am the PM and there have been some improvements made to an app XYZ, so I do not say that I delivered the product, it is always we, refers to the whole team.
‣ So humbleness is an important characteristic that one must possess in order to create a great team environment and carry out every process and decision-making with ease.
‣ Let us see an example here “ The strategy that has been devised is proofing successful and our new feature has exceeded initial metrics improvement estimations significantly. That wouldn't be possible without the team’s long hours and hard work.”
‣ Having the mentality of being humble helps to build trust and generate a group around with people that support you as a PM in your journey.
3. CHALLENGING YOURSELF:
‣ It helps to challenge yourself and take the very best steps needed for making your existing product a better one.
‣ Questioning and challenging yourself will help you be more confident and trustworthy and at the same time prevent you from being overconfident.
‣ It is more about having a routine of double-checking one’s assumptions, data, and decisions.
‣ There is a rubber duck theory that states that “When a programmer needs to debug their code, they should explain the program line-by-line to a rubber duck.” This act of explaining the problem step by step causes the solution to present itself and minimize the number of errors that can occur. This theory can be used in PM roles as well will help you cross-check and eliminate the shortcomings.
4. EMPATHY & RESPECT:
‣ In your role as a PM you are dealing with a lot of people around you. Everyone has their own problems, health issues, family conditions, etc and you need to be empathetic around these people so that they feel supported and do not have to go through the problem alone.
‣ Everyone in a team needs respect in all aspects. I am sure you would not want up ending to be rude to people and firing them out without understanding their problems. As a PM you need to take responsibility for those around you and treat them with respect and help make their life and work more comfortable.
‣ These qualities help to bring stronger professional bonds too and nevertheless personal outside the workplace too, so make sure that you respect, support, and empathize with those around you.
5. INTEGRITY:
‣ Let us what does this means. According to Wikipedia “Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. Integrity can standing opposition to hypocrisy.”
‣ This is important because once people trust you it is always easier for both of you to work with each other. Always as a PM, you should keep your words or in simpler meaning do as you say. If you end up being involved in the politics in the company the people around you may lose trust completely from you and it would create stress in the environment causing it difficult for them to work with you.
‣ It boils down to not just 8 hours of work in the office but an aim to come up with a better product to solve the stakeholder's concerns and deliver more value to it along with your team.
‣ A PM with integrity will not try to run away from his mistakes and will not try to avoid responsibility.
6. DIPLOMACY:
‣ So it is obvious that as a PM you will have loads of work to do, you cannot end up saying yes to each one of your stakeholders just to make them happy.
‣ There have to be situations where you are required to say no to them, but do you directly say a no to them. Of course not, your answer needs to be presented in a well-structured manner so that neither you nor your stakeholder feel bad about it.
‣ We all know that every team has its own limited build capacity of how much load they can handle, so saying no is important but yes always the right way.
‣ Be very strategic about what you speak and you must train your thought for the same. You have to present the stakeholder with what is the agenda and other things that need to be done. For eg: make the stakeholders understand the benefits of what will happen etc.
‣ Putting the efforts will help make a stronger bond with the stakeholder and keep that trust that you will do a meticulous job when choosing the things to be developed for their products.
‣ This is an example of a good way to deliver a decision when it is forced on you “This urgent request from the corporate is meant to align us with the company’s new policy and I believe that this is really important. Let’s do this together quickly, so we can go back to the regular plan asap.”
7. TRANSPARENCY:
‣ This is directly taken from a development framework called Agile Scrum.
‣ According to the definition “Transparency means presenting the facts as it is. All people involved — the customer, the CEO, and individual contributors — are transparent in their day-to-day dealings with others. They all trust each other and they all have the courage to keep each other abreast of good news as well as bad news. Everyone strives and collectively collaborates for the common organizational objective, and no one has any hidden agenda.”
‣ It means that it is easy to process your transparent decision making, easy to read the data, truthfulness, courage and so much more. A good PM should be like an open book where everyone knows about him and nothing remains hidden.
‣ PMs should be easily accessible, easy to understand, and well-motivated too. It helps to build understanding and obviously saves the time of the PM and also helps to avoid risks because more people can examine your work and help you minimize the risks and thus limiting the possible future issues.
8. BEING AHEAD OF THE GAME:
‣ Being ahead of the game provides an extra edge for the PMs. It helps them understand or predict the future shortcomings or the differentiating factor of their product which makes them ahead in the race with other products.
‣ As I can relate from the books I read, Steve Jobs the founder of Apple always had a five-year plan for any of the products that were designed by Apple. This helped him stay ahead of all his competitors and provided an extra edge in the competition.
‣ So every PM should have a vision that is ahead of time whether it is rolling out a new product or new features in the existing products along with being conscious of both new & old competitors in the market working on the same problem statement etc. There can be many things involved all along at the same time.
‣ Being ahead of the game brings value to both the product and the company. It helps be ahead in the competition & be ready for solving the upcoming hurdles along the way.
This is what I understood as I am still going through the course but yes there is a lot to learn as well. As I dive deeper I will keep sharing my learnings through the blogs and help you grow together with me on this journey of becoming a PM. As I am a final year student I keep looking for opportunities and I am sure I will carry the badge of a PM this year!!
Kudos to you for giving your time and reading along. Keep Learning🙌, keep growing until we meet the next time! Good luck 💻
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