The top-8 skills for a Product Owner and Product Manager in 2022
A frequently asked question from Product Owners and Product Managers in the field is: “What are the most important skills for a Product Owner/ Product Manager?” This article will provide you with our perspective on the Product Owner / Product Manager role and answer to this question about their skills.
Product Management is a complex, yet amazing profession. Product Managers require a broad range of capabilities, knowledge and competences. How the profession is defined and executed greatly depends on the organization, type of product, career pathways, and industry. Product management consists of many different concepts, practices, tools, and responsibilities, and is implemented in many different ways across organizations and industries.
That being said, We believe that Product Owners and Product Managers need to be constantly upgrading their knowledge, skills, and competencies to stay competitive. Great product professionals are always interested in learning about new technologies or methodologies that could help them be more effective, and become better peers or coworkers. That being said, let’s explore the most important product management skill areas to acquire:
- Communication Skills
- Entrepreneurial Skills
- Leadership Skills
- Product Skills
- People Skills
- Process Skills
- Business Skills
- Market Skills
Each competency area is explored in more detail below.
What is a Product Owner or Product Manager?
Similar to the skills questions, this also is a frequently asked question.
A simple way to explain this, is that product management is a profession, and the Product Manager has evolved as a role from that profession. The Product Owner is an accountability (or role if you will) that originates from the Scrum framework. They may have different origins, but are very similar. Both Product Owners and Product Managers take on the duties of making their product a success in the marketplace. They both seek to solve the right customer problems, and to deliver the right type of value for it.
Someone in a Product Owner or Producct Manager role is someone who manages a product end-to-end, throughout the product life cycle. This person is focused on managing product strategy (identifying and defining the customer/market problem to solve, vision, strategy, product goals, and objectives), managing product development (Product Backlog, roadmap, prioritization, requirements), and managing product marketing (Pricing, go-to-market, positioning).
Being an effective Product Owner or Product Manager is obviously not a one-person job. Many Product Owners/ Managers need to collaborate closely with stakeholders in the organization. These include marketing, sales, executives, design, engineering, strategy, customer experience, and others. Product Owners/ Managers should deeply understand their product, customers and users, and the market it serves in order to solve the right problems and deliver the right kind of value with their product.
To put it simply: a Product Owner is a Product Manager. A Product Manager could also be a Product Owner. We have actually written a more comprehensive article to cover this topic in itself. So, if you want to learn more about the differences and overlap between a Product Owner and a Product Manager, then read this article.
“At the end of the day, your job isn’t to get the requirements right — your job is to change the world.”
— Jeff Patton, Veteran Product Manager and Consultant
The top-8 skill areas for a Product Owner and Product Manager
The Professional Product Management (PPM) Competency Framework covers the product management skills and competencies that you may need to develop. This framework is used by organizations to hire, develop and retain treir product professionals. It is a comprehensive framework that allows to be tailored to an organization’s specific needs.
We’ve learned that at the core of professional product management it is all about Communication and Entrepreneurship. Product Managers create value by seeking out new opportunities, by finding problems worth solving and communicating that to the rest of the organisation.
The other six areas that product managers need to master are Leadership skills, Product skills, People skills, Process skills, Business skills, and Market skills.
Let’s explore them in more detail:
Communication skills
To rock in a product management position, you need to be great at working with many different types of people. You need to be able to communicate with them effectively, you need to be able to empathize with your peers, coworkers, and leaders. You simply need to be a great communicator.
POs/PMs require the ability to communicate complex information clearly to many different audiences. They often know a great level of detail about new product features and upgrades, as well as all the details of the epics and stories to be developed. However, when speaking with executives and other decision-makers, sharing these details won’t serve them well. Discussing such details could undermine the support you are trying to secure, because executives are generally more interested in the strategic objectives at a high level. They are more interested in how the product will enable the company to achieve success. They want to know how the product will increase the company’s bottom line, etc. So you will need to know how to effectively communicate with stakeholders at this level.
In addition, POs/PMs need a high level of self-awareness to remain objective and avoid projecting their own preferences onto the product and its customers and users. If a PM is in love with a feature because it addresses their own pain points, they may cause a user to say they love it too, just to please the PM. If not self-aware, a PM may push to prioritize a feature they conceived even when all the customer interviews and evidence are stacked against it. This lack of self-awareness could derail more-important priorities or damage the PM’s relationship with engineers, who may lose confidence in their PM when the feature isn’t readily adopted by users.
A more detailed article about the communication skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Entrepreneurial skills
Being able to identify the right (customer) problems to solve, and seizing the right opportunities together with them to maximize a product’s value, are of critical importance to any type of product professional. Being a PO/PM can be incredibly stressful. The CEO wants one thing, the engineering team another, and customers have their own opinions about the product’s priorities. They are often required to manage tight deadlines, revenue targets, market demands, prioritization conflicts, and resource constraints all at once, which is not for the faint of heart. The best POs/PMs know how to make good decisions. They involve the right people, and make decisions at a high pace. They identify the right opportunities, and manage risks effectively. They push hard on the right priorities, and behave in line within the company values.
A more detailed article about the entrepreneurial skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Leadership skills
Great Product Managers have great leadership skills. They possess skills around advocating the product, they are contributors to building a strong culture and sense of togetherness in the team. They are also able to support and develop others, to lead people and teams, and to communicate vision and goals effectively through storytelling for example.
Product Owners/Managers own the product vision, strategy, and goals, which need to be evangelized throughout the organization. The overall direction of the product needs to be communicated consistently and frequently to ensure that everyone is aligned. This communication often needs to be tailored to the audience, and storytelling is often a big part of this effort. It is hard to overcommunicate the product direction. Product Owners/Managers often believe that the vision and strategy are clear to everyone, but for the rest of the organization, it is often not so. POs/PMs need to remind them of the vision, strategy and goals again and again, so that decisions are made with the product direction in mind.
Although owning and setting the product direction is a very important and visible responsibility of POs/PMs, building the product team is equally important. Building a team starts with hiring the right people. Once hired, new team members need to be onboarded. Product Owners/Managers need to spend sufficient time providing context about the product and its direction, explaining the processes and tools, and outlining the organizational context and the culture of the team.
An important responsibility for Product Leaders, is also to develop the product team and/or their peers in Product Management. This could start with setting clear expectations what is expected of each team member. It could range all the way to creating formal role descriptions, a career ladder that describes required competencies for each level of seniority, or creating an agreement between leadership and team member. In addition to these expectations, career development goals should be agreed with each team member, based on the needs of the company but also based on the interests of the individual.
Another important leadership skill relates to establishing the right culture. A PO/PM/PL obviously can’t change the company culture single-handedly, but they surely have an important role to play. They can empower the cross-functional product teams to discover and deliver solutions to customer problems. They can support in the acceptance of failures, and stimulate people to obtain feedback and learn. They can stimulate taking ownership of problems and let people self-manage and resolve them for example. Most importantly though, these product leaders should be role modelling the expected behaviour, providing feedback, and praising desirable behaviour that the team members display.
A more detailed article about the leadership skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Product skills
The Product skills area consists of skills around business expertise, company strategy, enabling product strategy, product roadmaps, managing product requirements, achieving product-market-fit, goal-setting, requirements management, and general product knowledge, and product-domain knowledge.
Products are intended to solve customer, user, and business problems. Great POs/PMs create products that fundamentally achieve this goal. A problem-solving mindset is a key part of creating great products, and therefore the ability to identify, describe, prioritize, and solve the right problems is a critical product management competency. However, just identifying and prioritizing the right problems to solve is not where it ends. Product Owners/Managers also drive the product strategy, manage the product roadmap to achieve objectives, and seek to achieve product-market-fit, by developing the right product requirements. This is where product strategy comes in, which involves both short-term and long-term goals. POs/PMs often have to make quick decisions based on these objectives, using data and insights.
A more detailed article about the product skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
People skills
One of the important skills of a great PO/PM is their ability to collaborate with other people. Collaboration with customers, users, executives, management, peers, and teams in engineering and design for example, is critical to a Product professional’s success. In order to collaborate effectively, they need strong relationship development and -management skills. By forming authentic and trustworthy connections with both internal and external stakeholders, POs/PMs inspire people and help them reach their full potential. Building strong relationships is also critical in negotiation, resolving conflicts, and collaborating with others towards a shared goal. Especially when balancing the needs of customers, resource-constrains, and company objectives, these skills are critical.
Developing authentic and trusting relationships often leads to more supportive stakeholders, when additional funding is needed for example, or when dealing with conflicting stakeholder interests. These people skills also prove to be valuable when collaborating with others outside the organization. For example to encourage customers to test a new feature for early feedback, or to convince a prospect customer to try an MVP product. Strong people skills make a big difference between having irate customers because of a bug introduced into the product and those who say, “Don’t worry, we know you got this!”
A more detailed article about the people skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Process skills
The profession of Product Management touches on many different processes, and therefore many process-related skills. The type of product, who uses it, and the type of company will determine what process skills are actually needed. For example, consider being a data science PO/PM at a bank, versus being the PO/PM for a fast-moving consumer product at a manufacturer, versus being a mobile app PO/PM for a food-delivery company. These different companies and products will have very different processes in place, and may require different skills from a PO/PM, right?
That said, having basic technical understanding of what is under the hood, how to deliver the product to customers, how to developer great product experiences, and mastery of the tools that PMs use is definitely important for the PO/PO role. Also consider skills related to product marketing, product development, agile development, product design, and release management as some universal skills for a Product Owner/Manager to develop.
A more detailed article about the process skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Business skills
The competencies associated with business skills are related to general business expertise, company strategy awareness, value estimation, prioritisation, value measurement, product finances, sales support, and product pricing.
Of course, POs/PMs must understand customers’ emotions and concerns about the product. But, they must also understand the concerns of the sales team on how to sell that product, or the support team on how to support it, or the engineering team on how to build it. POs/PMs need to have to have a deep understanding of how the organization operates and must build social capital to influence the success of their product. This ranges from obtaining budget and staffing, to sales support, to working on go-to-market strategies with marketing, to aligning to company strategy.
A more detailed article about the business skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Market skills
Having great Market skills is an essential skill for most Product Managers. They need to be able to discover the right problems to solve, by understanding their customers, users, market(s), domain, and broader topics like technology and data really well.
Great POs/PMs are always looking beyond their product into the wider world. They pay attention to what their customers and users need and look for opportunities to expand into new target markets. They keep an eye on the competition to stay one step ahead of them.
Having experience with conducting market research is important for any good Product Owner/Manager. When conceptualizing a new product, market research is critical to finding out whether there is a market or an audience for the product, as well as finding out how the product can best serve that market. This includes assessing customer needs and gathering customer feedback, and can also entail conducting user interviews and surveys or working with a user research team. They ask what needs to happen to develop a great product experencie and follow through on their learnings and insights. They are always listening and learning in order to be better.
It is a good habit to keep up to date with customer, user, and competitor insights, as those will pay off later on with a job well done. Knowing what problems to solve, what needs to satisfy, and what the competition offers, allows POs/PMs to design the best product with a great product-market fit.
A more detailed article about the market skills of Product Management professionals is discussed here.
Important to note is that you very likely don’t need to master every single skill listed here. Being awesome in every aspect and area of the Professional Product Management Competency Framework would probably mean that you are from outer space, because no normal human being can be perfect in everything. So, focus on leveraging your strengths mostly, maybe develop some of your weaker skills that are critical to the job of being a Product Leader, and find other people around you to complement your skills.
Want to learn how to develop your skills as a Product Owner or Product Manager to become a Product Leader?
We have written a quite extensive article about developing your product management skills in this article. It covers a typical product management career pathway with roles/positions, it covers the Professional Product Management Competency Framework in more detail, and describes a typical learning & development journey for Product Owners and Product Managers.
Excited to move your Product Management skills forward?
Becoming an expert in a field takes more than a single course. It is more like a journey, requiring knowledge gathering and experience in practice. That is why we have developed Product Management Learning Journeys for Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders.
If you want to use a structured approach to boost just those skills that you need to improve in order to take the next step in your career, then consider our Professional Product Management Training Modules. Modules like Value Maximization, Envisioning & Storytelling, Strategy & Roadmapping, or Stakeholder Engagement & Politics provide you with 8+ week learning and development tracks, allowing you to really improve a specific area of competence, instead of going through a very generic course that covers all kinds of different topics on a high-abstraction level.
Our learning journeys are designed to find the perfect balance between the theory from university with the intensity of a bootcamp. These ingredients are blended into a training format that fits anyone’s preferred style of learning. We teach you enough theory to know when you’re playing with fire, but we focus on applicability for the job to be done.
The journeys offer a personalized approach for professionals to grow their capabilities and to advance their careers. The blended learning journeys around product management consist of (competency) assessments, trainings, workshops, exercises, on-demand content, personal reflection, coaching, and consultancy.
The foundation of the product management journey is formed by the PPM framework. It’s connected to your product career framework and is implemented throughout the whole learning journey.
Want to get started? Take a moment to explore our website, learn more about our approach to Product Management, or schedule a chat about how we can help you, your team, or company to move forward.
