Product Management Skills Series — Part 2: The overrated skills
Writing the first part of this series was rather comfortable. Everyone expects Product Management to be a juggler’s game and thus most skills are assumed underrated. This one is going to be a little bit more controversial as I talk about skills which are generally over rated by both product managers and others in the product creation setup.
Having said that, these skills are ‘overrated’ and not ‘unnecessary’. It is important to talk about these, because a lot of young Product folks spend too much energy in worrying about acquiring skills that are not expected to provide the same returns as some of the underrated (or rightly rated, the next article) skills would do. Sometimes even product leaders push younger product managers to spend unnecessary times on gaining the expertise they don’t need.
Let’s get on the 5 most over rated Product management skills —
1. Design knowledge
If any Product person understands Design, they would also understand how it is a specialist skill and not a generalist skill. There are a few kind of Product managers that I have seen –
- Those who believe they have an innate ‘eye’ and a superior design ‘sense’, giving them right to handhold designers with their work
- Those who believe that their business goals can all be achieved only by doing A/B tests on colours and text changes
- Those who expect designers to solve user problems with the magic of ‘creativity’ and then provide subjective feedback on how mocks ‘look’
- Those who trust the designers with their skill and help them by owning user flows
Different organisations work differently, so there is one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to Design–PM relationship. Having clear ownership works, and if that is defined on skill basis, it works better.
Designing products in 2020 is an extremely nuanced skill where designers need to be cognizant of current trends in iOS, Android and Web markets for visual, audio, interaction and various other aspects of design. At the same time, they have to solve for consistency and usability. All this with an obvious expectation for the Product to look different/best as well. Gaining that expertise and skill takes a lot of time. Specially as a PM from a non–design background one will take an enormous amount of time to come close to a designer’s ability. That’s why it is an overrated skill.
Having said that, if one is curious about design, then study and execute. Install Sketch or Figma (or just ask your designer teammate or friend), utilise your weekends and build up a skill. Till then, trust the designers with their skill and help them by unblocking them and by giving them very clear flows and expectations and then let the magic happen.
2. Engineering knowledge
Having talked with many Product leaders over last few years there is only one common trend about learning technology — the more you learn, the hunger to learn will keep increasing. As Ajey Gore, CTO Gojek says—
Always assume you are the dumbest in the room, so there is no question that is wrong and there is no doubt that does not deserve to be clarified. As long as you realise that, there is always a lot to learn, humility will kick in and you will feel privileged keep your learning mode on.
This is a more relevant topic of those aspiring PMs / new PMs who have never written code in their life — “Can I become a PM, even if I have zero knowledge of coding?”, YES!
Not being an Engineer should not be a deterrent to you becoming PM. Also, if you are a non–coding PM, you don’t need to spend a large chunk of your time and energy in learning to code. If you choose to do that, you should learn to code only for two reasons—
- It will help you relate better with your engineers. You will understand their lingo, some of their challenges
- Because you enjoy it! Like you enjoy learning a new language.
As explained in the Design section, don’t learn coding because some engineers told you so, or because someone told you that they will not listen to you since you don’t understand technology. Don’t learn coding because one of your peer PM knows how to and talks smoothly with the engineers. Rather focus on your strength and continue to solve business and user problems with the tools you have.
Having said that, you must spend some time to understand enough technology to have healthy conversations with your Frontend, Backend, QA, Engineers. If as a PM, you think you will do a better job at writing code than your engineer, I wish luck for the product :)
3. Strategy
Strategy is an overrated skill is because of the vague nature of this term and how loosely it is thrown around by people. People use the term strategy interchangeably with vision, plans, to-dos, roadmaps, backlog, pricing, go to market, marketing, growth and god knows what.
A young aspiring PM asked me — ‘ How do I build a career in Product Strategy?’;
I answered — ‘I only know one way, by execution. Execute enough to understand as many nuances of building product and that will give you some edge in doing ‘Strategy’ sometime in future. For now, know that there is only one strategy to start with and it’s called executing!’
Lots of times Strategy is mistaken for analytical approach or problem solving. Sometimes Strategy is used whenever there is need for critical decision making. Seldom it is also just inserted to add weight to actions — like Strategic Roadmap or Strategic Product Management (don’t have any idea what Non-Strategic Product Management is). May be an outcome of overdose of word strategy in MBAs.
Long story short, if you are in a fast moving startup then you will need to be strategic and tactical everyday by the virtue of the dynamic environment it provides. As long as you stay objective in your decision making, you will be learning more strategy then by adding the word strategy at random places. Get down on ground, get your hands dirty, talk to users, build stuff and do all this while thinking long term on a spectrum of what will happen scenarios, you’ll be fine!
4. Idea Generation
As Product managers, having a healthy list of ideas that can be used to solve user and business problems is paramount. What is not paramount is — believing that every single idea in the list should come from the Product Manager!
Sometimes under pressure from leaders, peers or themselves, some PMs get too harsh on themselves and try to only look inwards while generating ideas. This limits them and they end up having an incomplete possible universe. Blocking ideas at the top of the funnel, as it sounds, is not a great idea!
That’s why this is another overrated skill. Ideally the Product manager should be as open as possible to get the ideas from users, designers, engineers, peers, leadership, hackathons, friends & family, essentially wherever you can get from. The ego of ‘my idea’ is generally useless and will never help. If the problems you are solving are interesting, do workshops with some people in your company, build a story around the problem and order some food. People love solving problems when the problems are presented as puzzles and there is low pressure environment. This method works much better than stressing out on building a list of ideas after you’ve hit a wall in thinking!
The last article in the series will be on rightly rated skills for Product Management.
Meanwhile, stay safe, stay indoors and don’t ignore the signs! Cheers.
