The key Business Skills for a Product Owner, Manager, and 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, as discussed in this article. Many of them however, have also mastered the Business Skills area as defined in the Professional Product Management Framework. These Business Skills will be discussed in this article in more detail. 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 Business Skills of a Product person in more detail. The other competencies areas are discussed in separate articles, listed at the bottom of this article.
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.
These skills are grouped into the following competencies:
Business Expertise & Strategy
Product Managers are able to contribute to and shape the domain strategy. They can create and clarify strategy within their domain with guidance. They contribute and influence at the team level.Value Maximization
Great Product Managers consistently deliver high-value, measurable, and meaningful customer outcomes, company impacts and benefits at the company level. They communicate to, and align the domain and stakeholders around, the desired outcomes.Financial Awareness & Planning
Great PMs drive discussions about costs versus value, based on the domain- and team-level product vision, strategy, roadmap and desired outcomes.Sales & Pricing
Most end-to-end responsible Product Managers co-create the Pricing Model, Strategy and Tactics in collaboration with sales, account management and marketing, to ensure our products generate optimal net revenues for the organization.
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.
