In the first part of this article, we discussed many essential skills for your success as a product manager. In this article, we will see many other skills for product management that you will find valuable in your arsenal.
Product Strategy
Understanding Competitive Landscape
Successful PMs understand the competitive landscape and industry trends and use this understanding to identify sustainable competitive advantages for their organizations. They must understand the competitor landscape and industry trends across various use cases.
These insights help you define a better product strategy and execute it with the development team. These insights allow you to make informed decisions throughout the product life cycle.
Frameworks like Strategic Group Analysis, Growth-Share Matrix, and Perceptual Mapping can help you analyze the competitive landscape effectively.
Product Vision
Based on the understanding of the problem & competitive landscapes, Product Managers must ensure that they can establish a strong product vision to guide all further development efforts. This vision is the north star around which all further discovery, design, and development efforts should be centered. The vision is the foundation for establishing a robust and effective product strategy.
For nuances of how to write a great product vision, you can read this article from Christian Trunk.
Business Outcomes Ownership
A great product manager is outcome-focused. The outcome consists of both; the value for the users and the achieving the strategic and operational goals for the business. She has to align the product vision with the business objectives and execute the product development in synchronization with the idea and purposes.
There are quite a few skill areas that help the PMs ensure this accountability.
1. Understanding Risk Management and developing strategies to mitigate those.
2. Understanding change management frameworks and utilizing those to ensure that the organization’s structure, culture, and processes are conducive to optimal value generation.
3. Being able to define appropriate metrics and track them to ensure the progress is on the right track.
Data-Driven Decision Making
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British politician
Making sense of the data is critical for a PM to make better decisions. Data analysis and conclusions are foundational skills supporting experimental mindset and outcome ownership.
Data-driven decision-making is a continuous, iterative process. You can use the following framework to adopt this approach.
1. Define the context, objective, and KPIs you want to optimize.
2. Identify what data is available, where it is, and what insights you can derive from it concerning your objectives and KPIs.
3. Identify the gaps between the availability and requirement of the data to make impactful decisions for your objectives and KPIs.
4. Identify the ways you can fill these gaps. Collect data from all possible sources, and collate it for further analysis.
5. Gather and analyze all the data and extract enough insights to make the decision.
Product Development
While all the skills above are critical to being a successful Product Manager, they are useless if you can’t translate those into actual products. The success of Product Management lies in delivering value to your customers through your product. Hence, hands-on product development skills are vital to being an effective product manager.
Product Roadmap Creation
Creating an effective product roadmap involves more than just planning out features and functionality. It also requires thinking about the overall experience of using the product and its evolution over time.
The best way to create a successful roadmap is by first defining the user journey. A good product manager will understand the customer’s needs and wants and then map out the steps required to fulfill those needs and wants.
This is done by identifying the key milestones and creating a plan for each milestone.
You should be able to identify the key features that will drive the adoption and usage of your product. These are usually the most important ones.
Prioritization is the most critical aspect of product roadmap creation. This is because it determines which feature gets added first and how many resources are allocated.
A good product manager will clearly understand the market dynamics and competitive landscape. This helps her prioritize the features based on their importance and potential ROI. Many frameworks are available for prioritization, and you might choose the best one given your context.
Project Management
“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.”
All the above skills we discussed were mostly related to defining what to do regarding the product. You will need excellent execution skills to turn all the vision, strategies, roadmap, and product features into a real, working product that your users and customers love to use and pay for.
Execution skills encompass many soft skills. They include:
Communication – How well you communicate with stakeholders, team members, and other departments within the organization.
Time management – How well you manage time for the entire team effectively to meet deadlines and deliver quality work.
Leadership – How well you lead your team and help them achieve their goals.
Organizational skills – How well you collaborate with others and get things done efficiently. Interpersonal skills are essential to ensure solid collaborative efforts from all parts of the organizational skills.
Problem-solving – How well you solve problems and develop creative solutions.
Self-management – How well you take care of yourself and maintain healthy habits.
The above is not an exhaustive list but covers the most pertinent aspects required for successful execution.
Stakeholder Management
Any product is ultimately about people. What and how you develop is influenced by people, and your product influences people in their lives. Stakeholder management is the skill to harness these collective influences for a positive and valuable outcome for everyone involved.
The stakeholder management consists of the following high-level activities;
1. Stakeholder Identification – People and entities that can influence product development and those affected by the product you develop.
2. Stakeholder Analysis – How will these stakeholder influence product development? How will they get impacted? Many tools and techniques are available for Stakeholder Analysis, including Power Interest Grid.
3. Stakeholder Management – Based on the stakeholder analysis, devise the strategy to manage the bi-directional influences and execute that strategy. Stakeholder Communication is a critical aspect of Stakeholder Management. Again, various tools and techniques exist, like the RACI Matrix and its variations.
One of the most critical aspects of stakeholder communication is handling customer feedback and integrating it into future product development efforts. Managing this communication effectively will ensure that your product is valuable for all customers and users.
Conclusion
While the skills listed above provide comprehensive lists, they represent or touch upon many other soft and hard skills critical for being a successful product manager. These skills cover the entire range starting from strategic thinking to technical skills. Communication & collaboration skills, empathy, critical thinking, and systems thinking are a few overarching soft skills. On the other hand, prioritization, design thinking, and even technology skills are examples of overarching hard skills.
Acquiring these skills is a process, a journey. One that makes you a better product manager through practice and allows you to influence the outcomes in a positive, valuable manner.
[…] role will have specific requirements depending upon the context, there are a few overarching and essential product management skills and areas that you will need to gradually master as you progress toward being a successful product […]