4 skills that set apart great product managers
I’ve been a product manager for five years. I’ve seen a lot of PMs spend time and effort in places where it doesn’t move the needle. Early in your career, it’s tempting to put your head down and get lost in execution. But if you’re focused too much on timelines and delivery (regardless of what you’re delivering), you can miss the bigger picture that will make you a truly exceptional PM. Here are the four skills I’ve observed that help PMs “pull up” from execution and excel in a way that drives real business value:
Building relationships
Being a master PM means being the ultimate people person. Being able to make the user or client feel comfortable within seconds, being empathetic, and embracing the other person’s perspective is a big part of the job. It means you’re able to truly and openly communicate with your customers and understand their needs. When you can view the other person’s perspective from his or her shoes without passing judgment, you make the other person feel comfortable, which allows him or her to open up and share what really bothers them and why.
One of the most challenging products I built targeted millennial moms. As a man with no kids of my own at the time, it was challenging to find common ground with the people I most needed to understand.
Initially, I tried to conduct one-on-one interview sessions, asking questions about their day-to-day lives. Still, I received answers that felt like what they wanted me to hear, or what they thought would be most relevant to me as a young man, rather than authentic answers about their most urgent problems.
So I took another approach and gathered focus groups — I thought that they might share more with each other than with me if I wasn’t coming across as relatable. It was much better, because there was a real discussion, and they shared what they were dealing with, but I couldn’t direct the conversation to validate my assumptions. At some point, I stumbled upon an article that was all about keys for hacking relationships. One of the keys was “identify with someone else through personal experience,” and the hack was that sharing a close friend’s experience is almost powerful as having your own. I took a stab and spoke with my mother-in-law, and after a while, I had enough stories that I could connect with to direct the discussions within the focus groups. I quickly found myself having authentic focus groups via video calls, with a few women who were glad to share their struggles over a glass of wine :).
Being the voice of the customer
The most exciting things for PMs are happening in the world outside of the office — so get out! The whole product life cycle, from discovering the market pains to building a product that delights users, requires an ongoing connection with users and clients.
Serving as the voice of the user is the unique value that only you can bring to the table.
Find the most painful problems and decide which you are going to address — this is your task. If you don’t do that, no one else will. Not speaking with users is one of the most common mistakes that first-time founders make — they build a product based on the founder’s pain rather than that of the market, and eventually end up with a product that meets only a few personal needs.
In my last adventure, we built a virtual AI companion that helps you clear your mind. Initially, we came up with a solution that was mainly about productivity, assisting people in setting up reminders and events easily using free text. We created ‘Me’, a reminder chatbot. We noticed that users who were highly engaged at the start churned much more quickly than others. This type of user could create dozens of reminders and events just for the upcoming days, vs. users who had a slow start, with two reminders on average for their first day. As a PM, I would expect the exact opposite. After dozens of conversations, I learned that those power users are mentally overloaded. Creating reminders was so easy for them that they created more than they could do, which eventually make them feel less productive, and sometimes even critical with themselves. So instead of encouraging them to use ‘Me’ to set as many reminders as they needed, we made them focus on just 2–3 essential things that MUST get done. This way, they stayed focused and put the effort on the right things instead of being all over the place. We learned that it’s not about being more productive — it’s about feeling productive. We crafted the bot’s tone of voice to be positive and empathic so that our users would feel that they were doing well. Once we did that, retention went up dramatically, referrals increased, and today ‘Me’ serves over 6 million users.
Discovery and experiments
There are two sources you can use for discovery: Data and Customers.
- Data can give you a hint about where to look, where users are experiencing issues in the flow, where you’re detecting abnormal user behavior — but it won’t tell you why. ‘Why’ you will only learn from talking to your customers.
- Being able to combine qualitative insight from your customers with great data scientists’ minds to deepen their analysis — this will make you A GREAT PRODUCT MANAGER.
One of the most valuable things that PM can create in the product are hooks that will drive growth and retention. Using data, you can learn when users are more likely to use the product, and speaking with customers, you will get the why, or in other words, the trigger that made them coming from the first place.
In one of the companies where I worked, we noticed that the power users were using the app in a time and place unlike other users. When we drilled down, we learned that they were taking meaningful actions (such as making a purchase) while commuting and completing errands — users found our tool highly productive in these specific moments. So we designed growth hacking experiments (read more) to encourage the overall customer base to do the same as these power users, and created internal and external triggers that drove engagement with the product. If you manage to produce even one trigger that will encourage your users on a daily or weekly basis to have a meaningful interaction with your product, you did your job. (read more here “When better, faster, stronger isn’t enough”)
Becoming a Storyteller
Product Managers should be able to tell a compelling story, starting with their core team.
You want to inspire the UX/UI and R&D team to come up with the most desirable solution for the user, help marketing and sales pinpoint their sales pitch, and guide support to provide the best customer service.
You do not have to be talented to tell a story — you could do it by pitching the same story over and over again to different people. When I start to work on a new product or feature, the first thing I do is to pitch it to myself out loud. Doing this allows me to arrange my thoughts and carefully choose the words I’m using to draw attention. Then the fun begins — I pitch it as much as needed to different people, and focus on their reactions, trying to spot which sentences made more sense to them, what did I say that moved them, and when they got eager to take action. These ‘dry-runs’ help you to build a compelling story with confidence, the better you prepare your team will be more committed.
Each one of these skills is important — but it’s even more critical to bring them together. Your manager or CEO can poke holes in a good story. Data analysis can go to waste if you don’t know where to direct them. Customer conversations only contribute value if you’re willing to learn something new.
It’s the synthesis of all of these things — empathetic customer relationships, data-driven experiments, a compelling story for your team — that enable you to build an innovative product strategy. These make you more than just another executor, or just another person with an opinion. These are the skills of a great product manager who builds businesses and gains the trust and respect of CEOs.
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