If you need to look at one role with the most diverse business skills, it would be that of a product manager. The variety of organizational dimensions that product management influences are unparalleled. This need for an extensive skillset is because product management sits at the trisection of the customer, technology, and business. That’s why you discuss a vast range of diverse skills when discussing product management skills.
Given this unique positioning, you can categorize all the skills that a product manager requires into four major areas. As product management assumes even greater importance than ever, learning about these skills will help you define a roadmap for your career growth.
Critical Areas of Product Management Skills
1. Problem Definition: Identify the correct customer problems
2. Solution Design: Identify the best solution for those problems
3. Product Strategy: Ensure that the problem & solution discovery, product development, and delivery are in alignment with the business strategy & desired outcomes
4. Product Development: Ensure that you implement these solutions in an optimal manner
Understanding The Context
Product Management is an umbrella term. The context in which you operate significantly impacts which skills you will require to succeed, given your unique situation. For example, if you work in a Business-to-Business (B2B) segment, specific skills will be more crucial than others in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) environment. Additionally, the technical design may also impact the requirements and applicability of skills. For example, a multi-tenant SaaS application will require a few unique skills than a single-tenant on-premises application. Even if the skills may be the same, their use may vary in each scenario. Finally, your organization’s structure and business model may further impact the need for skills.
Problem Definition
For the sake of this article, we will assume that the problem to be solved is already known. The product manager may or may not be the person to develop the problem statement. However, a product manager is responsible for defining all the contours of that problem and then working toward the solution.
Understanding the problem domain
Understanding everything that influences and may get affected by the solution is critical to finding the solution. This problem domain analysis is vital to understanding the constraints and challenges that may impact your product development.
While problem-domain analysis is critical, finding innovative, creative solutions is insufficient. The creative solutions are a result of looking beyond the problem domain. The answer may be hidden in a completely unrelated area.
Understanding the end user
The other critical aspect of the solution is to understand the users. While a deep understanding of their needs is vital, understanding their mindset, attitude, and, most importantly, behavior towards or related to the problem is critical. It is also crucial to understand the challenges that may render a perfect-sounding solution useless.
User Personas and empathy maps can be valuable for understanding your end user.
Defining The Problem To Be Solved
The problem domain analysis and understanding of your users from multiple dimensions help refine the contours of the problem you want to solve. When the entire issue is too big to solve in one go, you can narrow your focus on optimally solving one or two aspects of the problem.
Defining the problem means differentiating the root cause from the symptoms.
Defining the problem well is half the battle won. Therefore, problem definition is a critical skill for a successful product manager.
Solution Design
Experimentation Mindset
Once you have identified the problem, you start forming the possible solutions with the design and technology teams. It is critical to remember that there will usually be more than one solution, especially if the problem is complex. There will also be a variety of approaches to implementing any given solution.
Given this variety, you must optimize the solution through experiments. The empirical approach enables you to make better decisions.
1. Set clear hypothesis & success criteria. Some experiments, like A/B Tests, allow experimenting without a hypothesis. However, these tests are only possible with limited, simple options. When you have multiple or complex options to test, there has to be a hypothesis, an assumption, or a thought you want to try and get a clear answer indicating what you should do.
3. Minimize the work to be done. Your priority should be to cut down on the options you want to try. Then, go through all the possibilities, apply criteria to choose the areas where you want to focus, and experiment within those boundaries.
2. Prioritize continuously and objectively. You can use various methods to create a shortlist of your options and prioritize them. RICE Prioritization Framework is one of the proven and simple frameworks to use. There are plenty of others, and you can choose one or a combination of them, given your context.
3. Keep the experiments small. There are two benefits of this approach. One, you learn fast from the feedback, and two, you don’t make an irreversible or costly decision that makes changes nearly impossible.
4. Capture objective feedback from the users. Many capable User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) tools can give you critical information. However, if you are more technical inclined, you can go one step further to use User and Entity Behaviour Analysis (UEBA) which provides insights into the behavior of backend systems.
Prototypes and MVPs are also part of the experimentation. There are a variety of ways to build prototypes and MVPs. We will look at them in detail in other articles.
User Experience Design
Design, to me, encompasses two aspects; aesthetics and functionality. Product managers must understand the design from the aesthetics perspective, but it is a far more critical skill to look at the overall product design holistically. Understanding Systems Thinking can be valuable in this regard.
Sustainable product success comes from the optimized interaction of all the bits and pieces, including the visible and invisible parts of the product, is optimized. Systems thinking allows product managers to create an effective project strategy.
However, you must not forget that, ultimately, you are designing the products for humans (well, primarily). Understanding the elements of Human Centered Design can also benefit product managers. However, considering that what humans do influences many other entities in nature, many designers are also adopting the principles of Life-Centered Design, an approach that considers the impact on other humans, all kinds of animals, birds, insects, and in general, the entire planet,
While many design tools are available, I have always considered prototypes valuable for understanding the contours and challenges of user experiences. A physical prototype can provide the users with tangible ways to understand how they would interact with the product and provide valuable insights to the product teams.
[…] company and each 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 […]