Insights from LinkedIn: Journey of Becoming a Great Product Manager
Ever wondered about the skills required to become a great PM? Neeraj Parmar, Product Manager at LinkedIn, shared his insights on 10 tools to become a great Product Manager at our Product People Community event.
One of the questions which always pops up in the minds of a Product Manager is “How to become better at what we do?” or if you are an aspiring Product Manager the question modifies to “What is the role of a Product Manager?”
Here are some important skills you should consider while answering both of these questions.
Skills for Being a Great Product Manager
- Awareness: As a PM one should be aware of oneself and their surroundings.
— Self Awareness: It is crucial to understand your passion, skill set and your weakness since the role of a PM is tightly connected to the product you are working on. You may be a great Product Manager for one variety of the product but may not be good enough for some other types of products.
— Team Awareness: Being compassionate with the team you work with is important. As a PM, one should listen to the team members and try making a special bond with them. One should always balance the tension to push forward and still manage to have the patience to get the best results.
— Company Awareness: Skim through the weekly and daily data related to the company.
— Macro Awareness: Having a business environment awareness is as crucial as having company awareness. There could be some technological advancements, economic or political changes which could affect the company and one should keep track of them. - Thinking and Writing Effectively: There will be three crucial documents which PMs have to write :
— Product Strategy: Defining why we are building the product and how it supports the organization.
— Product Requirement Document: What level of abstraction of data should be present in the PRD is always questionable. What is to be built should be explicitly mentioned but how to build it is the work of the engineers and designers.
— Product Launch Blog Posts: Write about the product to convey its vision to the people. - Meetings and Forums: There would be various key meetings that a PM needs to attend. One of the points to consider if you are hosting the meeting is to define that “This meeting will be successful if ….”.
Whenever a meeting is conducted it is pivotal to have a set agenda and also one should be prepared with a 1–2 page pre-read. Once the meeting is over always send the meeting minutes to avoid any confusion and to have proper documentation of the procedures discussed in the meeting.
- Understanding Data and Metrics: For understanding the customers better we need to understand the data.
The skills which a PM has to have for data analysis would be SQL for extracting data, data analysis tools such as Python, Excel or R. Moreover, a PM should be able to interpret the data by skimming through the data visualizations.
- Public Speaking: As a PM, communication is a key skill. To make the team understand the product and to communicate the product outcome to the market requires public communication. To be good at it one should always know the audience, have knowledge of the material, and always be passionate about the topic.
Audience perception of your speech according to Dr Albert Mehrabian’s 7–38–55 Rule: 55% body Language, 38% Tone and 7% the words spoken
- Understanding AI: AI is used to build the best products by optimizing resources, cost, and customer experiences. It is important to understand what the AI algorithm should optimize for. Besides, the PM should know which features the algorithm should be trained at. The type of data required for the algorithm is also a crucial point to be known since AI is a farce without data.
If you want to know more about AI Product Management, have a look at our recent article and talk on this topic: AI-Based Product Development at Zillow
- Time Management: As a PM, one will always be short on time, and accomplishing everything could be hard, hence prioritization is the answer. Prioritize tasks in your days, weeks, and quarters to focus on the important matters. Always try to keep some buffer time to think, so do not schedule meetings at every minute of the day.
- Effective Communication: As a PM we follow Pareto’s principle of 80/20.
“20% of the job is the idea. 80% of the job is communicating it.”
Characteristics of better communication :
— Authenticity: Be consistent between “What you believe”, “What you do”, “What you say” & “What you feel”
— Transparency: Be clear and concise with all the team members.
— Repetition: Over-communicate to help people internalize your message.
“History teaches that almost nothing a leader says is heard if spoken only once” — David Gergen
- Develop and Nurture Relationships: As the PM, you are not the boss and you are not managing anybody, thus maintaining a good relationship with the team members would help them work together towards the objective in a better way. Try to personally know the cross-functional team members, organize one-on-one meetings, try to be a part of informal gatherings to make relations in the company, and be compassionate towards your team members are some of the ways to develop the relationship.
- Articulating Team’s Vision to Values: The team should be aligned to what product they are building and the vision of the product. Understanding the value the product brings to the end-users will motivate the team to work with more passion and enthusiasm.
There are many product managers in different industries. It is always relatively easy to just stride with your day-to-day tasks, however, it takes a lot of efforts and expertise to excel in whatever you do. Becoming a great product manager is difficult but not impossible, consider all of the above pointers to become a strong product manager.
Watch the full version of Neeraj’s talk for more insights and a great Q&A session.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!
