Product Management Skills Series— Part 1: The underrated skills
“Hey DK, I want to be a PM, what are some of the skills I should have to be one?” is the most common question that young folks ask. This is a 3 article series talking about essential product management skills (Underrated, rightly rated and overrated). These are an outcome of my experiences of building products, building product teams, mentoring product managers, interacting with product managers in various industries / roles and hiring product managers.
Product management, for some reasons, is a hot area for professionals these days. I’ve met designers, engineers, strategy consultants, MBA students, entrepreneurs who want to move to become product managers. The internet is full of material on what product managers do. The information is overflowing and confusing at the same time. Only one major inference from that — Different companies have different ways of doing product management, which further increases the confusion for those who are new to the field or who want to move to the field. Whether all these great people should or should not move to product management is a topic I will cover in another blog, today let’s stick to the debated topic of skills.
On to the topic for today, here are some of the most underrated skills for PMs (in no particular order)
1. Communication
The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.
As a PM, the primary responsibility is
- To understand the user and business,
- mould it into a concept or a product or a feature,
- convince stakeholders as necessary,
- work with designers and engineers to ship it,
- measure success and failure and next actions.
- Repeat!
A PM great at all of these things but unable to impart or exchange this information in a concise manner is bound to get frustrated and that will reflect in the success of the product and the business. Communication is the oil that keeps this complex machine running!
The reason this is an underrated skill is that lots of PMs don’t see communication as a value addition exercise but as a time wasting / trivial exercise. Another common approach is assuming that the responsibility ends at sending reports or having large group meetings etc. The buck stops at the PM for all communication responsibility and it needs more of a ‘Whatever it takes’ approach and not a ‘I did my part’ approach.
The other reason why it is underrated is that communication skill is confused with knowledge of communication tools. Though tools are an essential part but not they are not the whole of communication. The core outcome of communication is alignment (not agreement). It’s important for the PM to make sure that everyone understands the concept of disagree and commit.
As far as tools is concerned, depending on the size of your teams you will find many of them. Slack, telegram, asana, google suites are all good if you can use them well. A separate blog on tools later!
Transparency in product discovery, product delivery and other business decisions is directly proportional to the team’s acumen to execute the right things for the user and the business.
2. User mindset
We are all biased by our experiences. It’s almost impossible to have no biases. we live lives, we meet people, we respect some we don’t like some, we go places, we use products, we love some products, we hate some. Our brain helps us take decisions on these perceptions, it helps us make micro and macro choices on all the data that we already have stored inside. That’s what makes having a user driven mindset extremely difficult.
What is user mindset?
Simply put, ability to understand the problems, needs, actions and behaviour of your users is user mindset.
Why is it important?
Assuming that users will just use your product because your product is ‘Good’ is the riskiest thing to do. Still serendipity can strike and product creation is a continuous iterative process and inability to understand the user is often fatal
How to build a user mindset?
User mindset is often termed as user empathy and things get complicated. I am no expert on user psychology but here are some things that I have learnt that can help you build a user mindset objectively —
- Bring user mindset at the core of product prioritisation decision making process. The main question that should keep bothering you at all levels is —
What is the most compelling reason for people to use my product (or even a new feature)?
Build user journey maps and ask this question at each point in the journey.
- Cut down on the assumption of seeing yourself as a user all the time. It will work sometime, but make sure that the understanding of who the user is clear. Even for large platform products like payments, start with some personas like office goers of some age group in some area and then keep looking to find more relevant users
- Talk to the users. The power users, the potential users, the peripheral users, the churned user, the resurrected user. Doesn’t matter what’s the size of your company. The smaller the company, the risk of not talking to the user is a lot more. The larger the company, some user talking will shift to data but don’t underestimate feedback.
- Learn about different kind of biases. Read and teach in your team too. A good understanding of the biases can help you be more aware and can help in preempting mistakes. It’s a world full of information, don’t do mistakes what others have already done. Here is a list of all cognitive biases for your reference — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
3. Data mindset
Most product leaders I know have one thing in common. They are addicted to data. They want to look at what’s happening with the product and the business everyday, if not many times a day (not weekly, not monthly, not x-weekly). Even in their insanely busy schedules, they found out time, mostly at start of the day, to spend some time understanding how the numbers are moving.
The reason I said addicted is because the more you look at data, the more you want to look and you want to go deeper. You want to explore more layers of information and figure our correlations and causations.
Why is it underrated?
- Fear of data. PMs from non data heavy background sometimes get overwhelmed. Which is fair but this is a critical skill to learn and it’s a great idea to spend some time to learn basic skills on the same. Coursera, Udemy and Youtube are full of basic course to get you going. Learn enough to be able to play with your product data yourself.
- It’s not my job. Some PMs rely too much on data and BI teams for their data needs. Either they want to spend all that time in writing PRDs or doing meetings with business teams or whatever they find more important. If you are lucky to have data teams, use their expertise in getting reusable data components or digging deeper into analytics that need more expertise than what you have.
- Inability to understand what DS / ML can do. These are the buzzwords these days. And that’s because they are the future. PMs working with products that generate tons of data
4. Ability to scope
For new product managers, the only way that I know of learning anything about product is by shipping. Spending time with the engineers and designers and shipping out products. This needs execution, building PRDs, wireframes, doing experiments and much more. Both prioritisation and scoping optimise for the same thing. How do we take out more to the user in less time to continue validation of our hypotheses. Though a lot of emphasis is given to prioritisation, the magical tool of scoping is under utilised!
PMs who build the frugal skill of scoping are great assets. They not only ship more, they help the leadership make better decisions.
What does scoping mean?
Simply put, scoping can be defined as the act of finding the least amount of work / tech that we need to build to test a hypothesis with users.
A term commonly used in Indian tech startup world is building a Taj Mahal! What’s Taj Mahal? — you have an idea, you discuss with a designer, you discuss with an engineer. Together you come up with a beautiful, awe-inspiring solution to that (either on the design side, or the engineering side, or the number of problem it solves for the user side), the problem is that Taj Mahal takes an insane amount of time to finish! And by the time it finishes, the priorities would’ve changed.
Taj Mahal is enemy of scoping. So as a PM, as soon as you see Taj Mahal being discussed, you need to help teams figure out the unnecessary and come up with the minimum. The two commonly used industry terms around this are MVP and Pareto principle. Both extremely important, both misused and misinterpreted at ease.
5. Knowledge of industries and the world in general
Product management needs one to build products today but at the same time build for future. This needs the PMs to continuously peak in the future. Staying ahead of the curve on a lot of macro aspects like
- How the world is changing from economic, political and environmental perspectives. Read Economist.
- What kind of technologies are getting obsolete and will not more be relevant in next few years. Read TechCrunch
- What new user behaviours are getting developed in the geographies you are operating in and other similar geographies. Read ProductHunt
- What major actions in the coming years can change the overall utility of your product in a positive or negative way
- How will your product become irrelevant by innovation across industries
- What does the world look like in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Follow smart folks on Twitter
This science fiction-ish approach will help you create vision for your product today and in future. This is one of the most underrated skill for intermediate and senior product managers and leaders because this doesn’t impact their everyday execution and work. Lack of understanding of the world and the future can easily be shadowed by everyday hustle (which is no less important). But this lack of understanding leads to lack of imagination which can lead to lack of impact creating world! What are we doing if not making a dent in the world! :)
6. Resilience
Product management can be extremely tiring. There might be more bad days than good days. Even good days are marred by conflicts and angry stakeholders or dissatisfied consumers. The top most underrated skill is being resilient and going on day by day without giving up. I have been lucky to work with some great product folks at GoJek and in past who have shown the path of how to be resilient. Of them all, Sudhanshu Raheja stands out. I’ll request him to write an article on sharing some of his thoughts on this soft skill.
How to be resilient in difficult times?
- Be accountable! But don’t be harsh on yourself. Own the results, fix what’s broken, learn from the failures. But don’t keep blaming yourself for things that don’t go the right way
- Find your process (not the product management process for your team). Find out what works for you, what helps you think, what helps you be at your best. Try to write down your thoughts and plans
- As I always say, find time for things that are important for you. Family, friends, sports, art forms, travel. The mind needs this
- Don’t let trivial people issues burden you day by day. Solve them proactively
- Share good things that are happening with the team and product. As much as you share the red signals
In the next part of this series, I will write about what are some of the overrated (but still relevant) skills for product management.
Till then
