What makes a great product manager

Product management is a relatively new field and as a result, there are lots of interpretations of what it actually means. Depending on where you work or which blog post you read, the expectations for what a PM should spend their days on can be wildly different.

At Tanda we’ve spent the last couple of years expanding our products and our team. In this time our definition and understanding of what it takes to be a really successful product manager has expanded a lot too.

What we realised is that there are a number of qualities a PM must have to succeed in creating products people love — as well as a number of pitfalls that need to be avoided. Here’s our definition, I hope this helps anyone trying to understand what it means to be a great product managers at a SaaS company:

The Decider

You can make great decisions quickly and confidently. This ensures the team isn’t slowed down and is confident about the direction they are moving in. If you can’t, you either make an educated hypothesis to move forward, which you then validate with customer data or you do the research required so that you can make a great decision.

You should know when it’s appropriate to do research and which type of research is best (calls, surveys, interviews, tests, experiments etc.) This isn’t a one size fits all approach, but you understand the right method for the right time.

Humble

The ability to be decisive and confident is really only one side of the coin, the other is also being humble. Acknowledging what you know and what you don’t know. Making a great product is a team sport best played by collaborating with others in your business who can offer different perspectives and information that you don’t have. You should always be striving to learn and focused on getting the right answer rather than being right.

As the decision maker, it can be tempting to fall into the mindset that you know more than everyone else. This is rarely the case and this attitude won’t lead to successful collaboration with other people and teams — which is key to product management.

Voice of customers

You understand what customers want and need. This means more than just the surface level feedback. You are able to identify trends and root issues across lots of customer inputs and use this information to ensure you solve the right problem.

You know that assumptions always need to be tested with real customers. The best PMs are the ones who strive to talk to customers and get their input at every opportunity through phone calls, interviews, surveys, experiments, tests etc.

You also work closely with customer-facing teams, collaborating with those who are even closer to customers on a daily basis can offer deep insight. Figuring out ways to work with them will help you be more effective.

Expert on market

As a PM it’s not enough to know your current customers really well, you must also understand the market. Who you are really competing against, where you are winning and where you are losing.

Having a commercial mindset means you can identify new opportunities for unmet needs or competitive advantages that should be explored. You need to understand the way customers think in your market, what they base their purchasing decisions off and what matters to them most.

This knowledge of the market you are competing in is crucial so that you can make decisions about which features to build or areas of the product to improve based on what is going to have the biggest business impact.

Big picture thinker

You are able to think outside the box to come up with clever solutions to problems. Using your understanding of the market and customers you are in the best position to identify areas of opportunity that haven’t been thought of before — or aren’t being specifically asked for by customers.

As a PM you should also be able to inspire your team to think about and work towards big ideas rather than just those that are obvious.

Technical

The more you understand and you can do yourself the more effective you and your team will be. This, of course, starts with having a deep understanding of the way the product you are managing actually works, how it gets used and how it gets built, end to end.

But being technical is more than this. It’s about being able to answer questions using data and analytics tools. Regardless of how well something’s been designed or built, products and their features aren’t actually successful unless people actually use them. This is why PMs must be using data to track adoption, understand which areas need work and see if what you ship has an impact or not.

You don’t have to necessarily have an IT degree to be a strong product manager but you do have to be comfortable getting your hands dirty to figure things out. The more you can do yourself, the easier it will be for the team to focus on shipping with your guidance

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Being a product manager is a challenging and brilliant role in the world of product. Making things that people want is hard. But with passionate PMs with these qualities, it can be easy.

If you want to chat more about what we do at Tanda and how we approach building product I’m always keen for a coffee ☕️