Soft skills — a hard requirement for product managers

Let’s face it, as a Product Manager you don’t do anything, you get things done!

Even if you come up with the solution to the problem on your own without discussing with other relevant people, you are not solving the problem — you’re building your personal opinion as a solution. In most cases, this may not be the right solution. A great product managers first finds out the problems by collecting user feedback (directly or indirectly) and then brainstorms the problems with their teammates to find the right solution. All the while, they are constantly looking for feedback.

Colin Pal puts it very nicely in his talk titled, “Hi, I’m a Product Manager and I’m the Hostage Negotiator”. As a product manager, you’ve got to have the right soft skills to negotiate every single situation with stakeholders. Like I said earlier, you have to collect feedback and brainstorm the problems with other stakeholders. However, you also have to act like a hostage negotiator when your stakeholders become hostage takers. For example, suppose your marketing team asks you to change messaging in your product in the middle of a sprint. It is your responsibility to negotiate with them to ensure that you are building a product with everyone’s interest in mind without letting them take hostage of your sprint. These situations can be tricky since you don’t want to burn any bridges while you also want to do the right thing.

From my experience so far, I believe that soft skills are a hard requirement for Product Management.

So what exactly are soft skills and how does one master them?

Soft Skill: “Personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.”

I will try to list down a few important ones for product managers:

• Active listening
• Influence without authority
• Presentation
• Communicating effectively

Active listening

As product managers, we usually get approached by our customer support people when the customer is facing issues. Most likely, you already have a lot on your plate so you want more information or more specific data from them before you can actually do anything. In such a situation, instead of cutting them off, try to listen to the whole problem. Try to put yourself in their shoes and understand how deeply they care about the customers. Build trust and establish rapport with them and tell them that you understand their concerns. Tell them that you care about the customer’s problems as much as they do. Once you establish rapport with them, they will be more receptive to what you have to say. You can then let them know that you have to investigate the problem a little bit more before taking an action. You can also explain to them that it will be useful if we collect data on how many customers are facing the same issue so that we don’t spend too much time or resources on fixing corner cases. It is really important to make them feel like they are understood. Listen to them actively before asking further questions.

Incidentally, you can apply active listening in any professional and personal interaction.

Influence without authority

The ability to influence your teams and a wide range of stakeholders is a must have quality of a product manager. You have to build credibility since you cannot lead by authority.

When I first moved into product management in a startup, developers and designers in the team knew about the users as much as I did. I did not know how to guide them as I felt they were guiding me in the right direction. I made sure that everyone knew that the successful feature ideas were coming from the team as a whole. I gave them full credit while sharing the successful product stories with the rest of the organization. I showed no hesitation in learning from them. I prepared and polished my ideas well before sharing them with my team. I told them stories after stories to ensure that they had the necessary context before working on the problem.

All of this helped me influence my team.

To master influence without authority, make sure you do the following -

a) Give credit to your team

b) Don’t hesitate to say “I don’t know but I will find out the right person who knows”

c) Show them that you care about them

d) Be the “go to” person

e) Don’t just share decisions or tasks, rather, share the background and tell compelling stories to motivate your team to work on them.

Presentation

One of the things that I love about Shopify is an event called “Shopify Hackdays”. Many successful Shopify product ideas have come from Hackdays. I was once building a Hackdays project with a team and the implementation was not even close to complete when I asked everyone to gather in order to prepare the presentation. The first reaction from the team was — “What are you talking about, we have nothing to show!”. I convinced them to gather and prioritize what can be done before the presentation. Working from different locations, we all got together, shared what was done so far. We prepared our pitch based on what was done and what it would look like if we got a chance to take it all the way. The entire team helped in preparing the pitch and we got the maximum votes amongst the teams in Europe. I think we were able to accomplish this because of the quality of our pitch and the demo.

As a product manager, your words need to be as good as your actions to build successful products and teams. If you think about what we do daily -the tasks, requirements, analysis, roadmaps and UX design- they don’t mean a lot unless we can get people to buy into the idea and execute to deliver the outcome.

Communicating effectively

As a product manager, you serve as a diplomat of the product team. You spend most of your time in communicating to internal or external teams or even outside your organization. Communicating effectively makes it easy to make the right decisions faster and build better products.

To communicate effectively, you need to follow a structured process. I am listing down a few points that help me communicate effectively:

a) Document as much of your work as possible, including project briefs, problem statements, ideas, user stories, decisions and other important tasks.

b) Share your project vision in terms of roadmaps.

c) Share clear timelines

d) Use task and project management tools

e) Plan meetings with clear written agenda, take meeting notes and share them.

f) Have regular status updates whenever necessary.

g) Tell a Story: I know you’ve heard this a million times but I can’t emphasis more. You’ve got to learn this art.

Soft skills are important and should not be overlooked.

Let’s call them real skills, not soft. — Seth Godin