Developing A T- Shaped Skill Set is the Secret Sauce Of Success In The Space of Product Management

Hi everyone!!

As all of us are going through a tough time, I really hope that you all are doing good and staying safe. Though i have not being active over here for the past couple of weeks but i am really hopeful that you all had some key takeaways from my previous articles. Now, provided i have spent some time in the product space, I have observed a very interesting fact and today i am going to share the same with all of you.

It’s easy to become hyper-focused on your own role within your company—or even to spend most of your time and energy on just a small portion of your role. While this approach helps you to expertise your skill sets on a particular domain, it kind of gives you a tunnel vision, thus creating blind spots around, and cause you to miss valuable insights that you would gain only by exposing yourself to different areas of the business.

Unfortunately, this is very common among product managers, many of whom have not learned to strike the appropriate balance among all of the different aspects of their roles. So if by any chance you’ve fallen into this trap, stay tuned to this as in this article i would walk you all through the disadvantages of staying in the PM comfort zone and would also discuss about few ways to expand one’s horizon as a Product Manager.

Being a Product Manager it’s very much important to cognizant yourself with the fact that Sky’s your limit as Product management encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, and few PMs enjoy them all. Some product managers, often those who come from technical backgrounds, prefer to roll up their sleeves and dig into the coding specifics and other details with their engineering teams whereas others, who might have a business or marketing background, prefer spending as much of their time focusing on that side of the business—and prefer to think of the development details. Problem is, when you stay in your PM comfort zone, you can miss lots of important insight and opportunities to build bonds with key people and teams across your organisation—all of which can lead to a better product.

A designer who has worked on both physical as well as software products, would bring great insights into a software team. An engineer who’s worked on large-scale systems could do the same for a product at smaller scale. Product management is no different, but actually, I’d argue it’s one role where being more well-rounded in your experience is even more important than in most other jobs.

There are product managers out there who have over five years of experience, but only in one company, product area, or industry. If that sounds like you, it’s recommend of making a conscious effort to become more well-rounded in your skills. Let’s talk about a few ways to do that.

• Set aside time to talk with any group in the organisation you’ve had no interaction with before:-Maybe you’ve never sat down with your customer support reps and listened to how they actually handle a real customer call about your product. Maybe you’ve never talked with your accounting department and asked them how they decide the amount of budget to allocate to your projects. Maybe you’ve never learned how your company’s deal-desk team handles the specifics of a close with your sales reps. If not, it’s high time that you do that as your product’s success in the market is in some way dependent on every area and every employee of your company. So learning about any department can give you new insights into parts of your product’s journey you’ve never known about. And these conversations can all lead to light bulb moments.
• Learn the dialect of one of your company’s teams that you’ve always found to be dull:- For some product managers, particularly those with a business or marketing background and little or no technical training, developer-speak often sounds like a foreign language. But to be a well-rounded PM, you can’t simply tune your developers out as soon as they start talking about coding details or other technical information relevant to building your product. You don’t need to become a full-blown engineer, but take some time to learn some of the language your engineering team uses and you’ll be in a better position to communicate exactly what you want to your technical teams.
• Make an effort to change your role at the company you’re currently with:- Explore a side of the business you have no experience in, or at least a part of the business that has more interaction with stakeholders you’ve never had to work with. For example, if you’ve never had to work with salespeople before, try a role closer to their team in something like add products, or if you’ve never had to manage another product manager, discuss with your manager a potential path forward where you could experience that portion of the job. Many companies today highly encourage their product managers to do a rotational program every so often in order to help them be better PMs, but also to get fresh eyes on a set of problems in the product.
• Spend some time honing your skills in the area of product management you hate or fear the most:-Maybe you’re comfortable with every area of your role as a PM except public speaking. If you’ve given in to that fear and accepted you’re just not an effective public speaker, chances are your roadmap presentations to your executive stakeholders aren’t as persuasive as you could make them, which could be costing you the timely buy-in you need to move ahead with your product’s plan. This fear could also mean you miss out on chances to participate in panels at important industry functions—a setback for both your products and your own career.

Well, being some who has just started his career i guess i won’t be the right person to suggest this, but if you are someone who has lots of experience under your belt and you have already spent a significant time in an organisation then you can think of switching your company as an option and can work in a different company entirely. This might feel scary, but this major shift in experience will help you in ways that you can’t get just by shifting internally. With a new company, you’ll be working in an entirely new environment, including a new organisational structure and personality types. Imagine how much more effective you can be if you’ve worked in several different product and engineering organisations, and are aware of the positives and negatives of each. If you’re at a large company that has aspects of each of these in various products, it may be possible to do this just by rotating internally at your company. So give it a shot. If you’re wary about switching companies, try doing some internal rotation first.

The overall goal here is to get out of your comfort zone as frequently as possible, and maximise the learning along the way. So stretch yourself in every possible area. Look for opportunities to sit on those panels. Stretching yourself in this way will do more than just make you a more well-rounded product manager. It will also put you in situations that lead to those valuable insights you might never have had if you stayed in your PM comfort zone.

I know it got a bit lengthy but I really hope, you would find this article useful.

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Regards,

Subhadeep Pal