The Core Skills that make a great Product Owner, Product Manager, and Product Leader
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?” Some of the best Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders we have worked with have mastered the core Professional Product Management competencies. They have a high Emotional Intelligence and have found the right company to work for (for them). They go far beyond shipping new features on a regular cadence. They keep the peace between engineering and design teams. And most importantly, they create great products with strong user adoption that have exponential revenue growth and perhaps even disrupt an industry. These Product professionals have mastered the core competencies that every PM must have. These are the competencies to be discussed in this article. But first, let me introduce you to the Professional Product Management Framework to position these core skills.
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.
In this article, we’ll explore the Core Skills of a Product person in more detail; being Communication and Entrepreneurship. The other competencies areas are discussed in separate articles, listed at the bottom of this article.
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.
Communication skills are grouped into the following competencies:
Creating Alignment
Actively communicate to ensure the domain is aligned and engaged. Improve how we communicate and helps others to improve how they communicate through defining best practices. Work to create alignment on a domain-level, cross-domain level and across departments.Effective Communication
Communicate with the wider organisation, including other teams in the product domain or area, customers and users. Help others in the team to communicate effectively, building good rapport and strong working relationships with colleagues and clients. Actively work to ensure that team is aligned and engaged around the vision, strategy, priorities and problems to be solved. Develop an opinion and argue persuasively without being defensive or combative.Offering and Receiving Feedback
Able to critique work at a level that allows team members to feel autonomous and empowered. Practice radical candour — timely, clear and directed feedback — to team and peers. Effectively deal with feedback that is being provided. Be able to anticipate feedback and address it proactively and professionally. Translate feedback into actions and improvements. Not let the ego influence the ability to receive feedback.
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.
These skills are grouped into the following competencies:
Decision Making
Take ownership of decisions made in the team by helping their teammates make clear decisions in alignment with organizational goals, backing decisions made, and taking responsibility for their success. Raise awareness for how biases impact decisions and ensures accountability is practiced within their team. Demonstrate these behaviours themselves.Ownership & Taking Responsibility
Take ownership of problems and solutions within and across the domain. No excuses. Act accountable and positively in all conditions. Take ownership of problems and challenges in the domain. Doesn’t blame.Thinking in Opportunities & Taking Risks
Identify and anticipate cross-domain and company-wide risks and issues and proactively find solutions to any obstacle. Take ownership of such opportunities, risks, and challenges to grow the company.
Want to learn about the other Professional Product Management Competency Areas?
The following articles discuss the other Competency Areas from the Professional Product Management Framework in more detail:
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.
