Women are great Product Managers — they just do not know it yet

🤗 Quick intro

I am a Product Manager from France. 🇫🇷 Born and raised in Clermont-Fd— a must-visit region of the world, the Lonely Planet said so! — and I live in Paris.

I’ve been working as a Product Manager for 8 years now, mostly on SaaS Products, in B2B and B2B2C marketplaces and always in international startups. 🏀 I love basketball, 🌱I have a healthy lifestyle and 🤩 I love wearing colourful sneakers.

This is my very first Medium post and I must admit I am ashamed because I already did a clickbait title.

Why? With such a title, you probably expect me to say in this article that women are great Product Managers because of their undeniable soft skills, because diversity is critical when building an outstanding Product Management team or because studies clearly show how great they are at solving problems.

Well, I decided to prove it the other way around giving you my opinion of what the most important qualities are to be a good PM . After that only, we will tackle the gender topic 😉.

Let’s go!

💪🏻 Best PM qualities

Non-exhaustive list, only my 2 cents :)

1. Be rigorous or leave

I started to work at a time where almost nobody in France knew what Product Management was. What I truly did was project management. My job was to ship features. I didn’t really know why but I had an Agile team. I had projects and a backlog I was responsible for. I didn’t really care about users’ initial problems. At least I was focused on shipping and it was a great way to start my career: learn classic project management and control scope, time, quality, etc.

Some would say pure Product Ownership cannot be considered as Product Management. But I would rather say the opposite.

Having rock-solid project management skills and mastering Scrum are the basic fundamentals that any Product Management needs to master.

Product Owner is a role you never give up completely. No matter your role in the organization, you will always need to interact effectively with you engineering teams, so the sooner you master it in your career, the better.

Back when I was that junior PO at Wonderbox (🎁 leisure gift boxes!), my manager was an experienced web project manager. She was used to dealing with international transactional websites, with the complexity of a physical product distribution.

She was a kick-ass manager who learnt everything by doing. The flipside of that: she didn’t have enough self-confidence. And clearly being a woman in a room full of men didn’t help with that!

Side note: women in tech are used to be surrounded by a lot of men. It forces us to truly understand men’s way of thinking: more direct feedback, less resentful. I don’t mean to be cliché on this one but I truly believe that being a woman amongst a lot of men make us stronger. Anyway. Back to my first kick-ass manager.

She was the best mentor I could have ever dreamt of because she taught me that essential professional rigour.

• Rigour to be careful on having the correct spelling, down to the last comma. Yes that’s important to:
• Respect users in every decision I make.
• Create great execution plans.
• Follow each iteration.
• Identify impacts and dependencies.
• Identify edge cases.
• Communicate effectively with engineers.
• And I could go on :)

I was impressed by her ability to master all of the above… on multiple cross-projects at the same time... while having fun with all the teams. She was able to identify in a few seconds edge cases I had missed, without even going through all my specifications.

A few years later, with experience, I realize I am able to do the same.

I truly believe this is because this 1st experience was a great first step into Product Management, even if of course, the point of Product Management is not to put things in Jira and make sure your developers have full backlogs.

But without rigour in doing so, you set your Product, your team and yourself up for failure.

2. Always keep a cool head

As Product Managers, a key aspect of our job is to collect, store and analyze tons of information from:

• All departments (support, customer success, sales, marketing, etc.)
• Your Product & Engineering team
• Your CEO and the entire exec. team
• Your users and prospects
• The market and the industry
• Competition
• Data gathered
• Cross-industries trends
• etc.

All PMs constantly face the following challenges — regarding the industry, the type of customers or the size of the company:

• How to make sure you have the right balance between delivering short-term value for your users… while making sure you serve your long-term vision ?
• How to execute quickly with a great quality level ?
• How to keep on improving your execution workflow within your team ?
• How to keep a cool head when you’re sent bugs and clients problems ?
• How to secure enough time to take a step back in order to define, challenge and share your long-term Product vision ?
• How to make sure you take decisions that constantly serve your vision ?

To summarize : How to avoid getting drawn under this continuous flow of information?

According to me, being a PM requires great skills of synthesis and the ability to constantly take a step back.

This constant back-and-forth between delivery and discovery, execution and strategy, short-term and long-term is a key challenge for any PM — except maybe for Associate Product Managers who may only focus on short-term execution.

So stay calm and keep cool because this is truly part of the job!✌🏻

3. BE humble

The basics for any PM — no matter the level or the experience. I believe this is how you do a great job as a PM and this is something I check systematically when hiring PMs.

The main reason is that as PMs, our cover of expertise is so large — business, tech, data, UX, UI and so on — we just can’t know it all but it’s our job to be able to show curiosity on a constant basis, on the right subjects and at the right time.

If you cannot admit you don’t master something, you’ll never get respect from your peers and colleagues.

Also, we constantly need to reinvent ourselves based on the new findings we will make, based on the evolution of technology, of our market, etc.

Surprisingly, without humility, it is quite tough to reinvent yourself and accept to be constantly challenged.

Remain humble

Further than that, I’m quite frustrated of the Product Managers that lack humility professionally as a whole.

Yes, we do a thriving job. Yes, this job is complex (in a good way). We have a strategic position in organizations. We make decisions that will impact thousands of users. We have no unemployment issues.

But getting new opportunities in your inbox daily doesn’t make you a great PM. It only highlights demand is higher than offer in our field of expertise. That’s it. Keep calm, be humble and answer with respect to ALL recruiters that show interest in your profile. Yes, I attempt to answer to everyone, no matter how personnalised the emails are. You just never know what future is made off, so be kind and respectful.

👥 Avoiding the gender trap

So… following this non-exhaustive list of top qualities… may women have what it takes to be good PMs ? Yes.

• They are able to be rigorous
• They know how to keep a cool head
• They are capable of demonstrating humility – maybe too much but that could be another post!

Let’s take a look at the definition of Product Management? Well, the point of Product Management is to create valuable products that customers love. Yes, women can be as capable as men to do so!

So let’s stop the pointless gender topic and focus on what matters: delivering value to our users while serving the strategic vision of your company.

👯‍♀️ Bonus : ladies, let’s raise our voices

This observation should not prevent us from showing and telling the world how good women can be as PMs.

In France, Product Management is quite a new job. There are not a lot of experienced Product Managers out there.

Still. Among those few experienced Product Managers, there are amazing PMs women but they remain silent.

They never raise their hands to talk in public. They don’t attend talks or meetups. They don’t speak during conferences. They don’t write Medium posts. We don’t see them in podcasts.

We lack women as Product mentors in France.

Unfortunately, we have no Melissa Perri or Sheryl Sandberg.

Why not ?

Ladies let’s speak up, let’s provide examples for other young women who want to work in tech - this is how we will make things move !

NB: This piece of advice is also to my own self. Yet, this post is my very first attempt to start sharing my own experience in a personal way 🙏🏽.