What Skills Should a Product Manager Have ?

The most commonly accepted skill model for product managers is often postulated as a 3-way Venn diagram between "business", "technology" and "user experience". However, in practice, the couls be different. Like the "user experience" may be replaced with "design" or "people". Depending on the kind of organization, "business" could end up being "statistics" or "finance".Remember, this diagram does not say that a product manager must be skilled in these areas, but definitely requires the skill to be able to align people with these skills to a common product vision.

Also this model gets a little complicated by variability in the role between organizations. Usually at large enterprises, a product manager may be accountable for P&L of a specific product, rather than working with developers and designers. At a high-growth startup, they may be working very cl;osely with developers and designers and could remain insulated from the financial decisions that are being made. So from one organization to the other, the product manager may end up working with very different kind of people. However, it will always be their job to connect and align them to the product vision.

So stemming from all of this variability, we could derive that the skills required to succeed as a product manager are more or less similar.

Communication : Communication is by far the most important skill for a product manager to develop and nurture. The ultimate skill is not only to tolerate, but actively enjoy the challenge of creating an alignment of understanding between different perspectives and roles in an organization. As a product manager one must strive have clarity over comfort in any discussion between multiple stakeholders. As a product manager, do not fear discomfort. Instead actively work through it to get clarity for yourself and your team.

Organization : Beyond honing their personal communication skills, product managers must organize their teams work as well. If communication skills come down to managing one-on-one interactions, organization is about scaling these.

Without this skill, product managers will quickly become a bottleneck for their teams. Product managers who lack this skill are happy to hear questions like "What should we be working on right now?" because these questions put them in an indispensable position of guiding the teams day-to-day priorities and decisions. In contrast product managers who excel at organizing see this question as a sign of something being broken. They strive to ensure that the team is well equipped to know what they should be working on and why, without having to ask. The guiding principle for organization is "change the rule, don't break?it". If an organizational process or practice is an impediment to acheiving the team's goals, it is your responsibility to work with the team to change that process or practice. Instead of breaking the rules for "special cases", one should reflect why the practices cannot accommodate these cases. Do not be afraid to challenge orthodox procedural baggage.

Research : According to an excellent book - Just Enough Reasearch, Erika Hall suggests that "Research is just another name for critical thinking". Indeed, this is a very important part of a product manager's job. Research is about seeking out and making sense of multiple perspectives and sources of information.

In theory, one should know their market and the users of their product. However, in practice, this may be far from a given and usually requires asking difficult questions and challenging assumptions that are deeply held in an organization. Great product managers never take anything for granted and constantly seek out new ideas, confounding variables and challenging perspectives. The whole idea is to "Live in your user's reality". Your users have their own set of priorities, needs and concerns, which might not seem directly related to their interactions with the product. Evaluate your competitor's landscape fairly and take an open holistic view to explore solutions to fast-changing user needs.

Execution : Of course, product managers are still responsible for making sure that the product stuff gets done. This may mean stepping up to do whatever work is needed for your team, even though it may not be a part of your job description. It is your job to inspire the team to do what it takes to get things done. Take a "no work beneath and no work above" approach and actively elevate any work by modeling its importance. An execution-minded product manager is willing to step into critical, high-level conversations for the sake of clarifying and achieving organizational goals, not for personal glory.

So what "Hard Skills" do i need ?

For product management, the distinction between soft and hard skills is particularly difficult to make. Bluntly put, far too many organizations hire product managers based on hard skills. I have seen fantastic product managers fail job interviews because they couldn't write an algorithm or solve a code challenge, even if their day to day work does not require them to do these things. The most common question asked by aspiring product managers is "just how technical do I have to be?"

Indeed, if you are working on a highly technical product, have a basic understanding of the underlying systems will help reduce the learning curve and can give you a good head start. However, i have seen and heard a few myths which we can together try and debunk :

You need hard skills to be respected by technical folks : This is frankly insulting to the technical folks, that they would respect only people who are technically skilled. There are enough instances of a product manager who starts of as a developer and later ends being that annoying guy who ends up meddling with every technical decision, because he thinks he understands it.

You need hard skills to challenge technical folks : Well, there could be some truth here. You definitely need to have some idea of how the systems work. Developers could tell you that something easy could take a longer time to build, than it should. But if your team is lying to you, you have bigger and more fundamental problems to solve.

You need hard skills to stay interested and do things like query databases, write documentation, etc.: In keeping with the idea that "if it needs to be done, it's your job," this is kind of true. Learning some programming skills may actually be useful to be able to do some minor tasks. The challenge here is not to be technical, but to be comfortable with exploring and learning new concepts.

Trust in your ability to learn and grow.