What makes a great product manager (PM)? The role requires balancing both the micro and macro aspects of product leadership while maintaining relationships with clients, employees and stakeholders — there’s a lot to juggle.
Exceptional product managers put people first, both as a leader and a collaborator. They build a community to solve a range of problems and bring their company’s product vision to life. But how do you develop your skills?
“‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ is an apt proverb in this case,” said Paul Bork of XSELL Technologies. “Where you direct your learning will be dependent on the needs of your team and a PM must be willing to adapt to those changing needs.”
Finding resources and a company to fully support you on this journey can be tricky. Although strong PMs will excel in most product roles, a lot of success in the product management field requires finding the right organization, and that can unfortunately be a rather vague guidepost.
With so many balls in the air, it can be difficult to know what qualities to look for in a top tier product manager — or how to embody them to get your dream role. Luckily, Built In Chicago sat down with three industry leaders to discuss their views on the topic, as well as how they personally develop their professional skills in the product management field.
What are the top three traits a person needs to be a great PM?
Being a terrific PM is both an art and a science. In my own decade-long PM tenure, I would pick three big “rocks” that are needed for success, while also adding that there are lots of “pebble” traits that are equally important.
The first rock is being in love with problems vs. solutions. It is so easy to see a problem and come up with a solution — that’s what most PMs want to do. Instead of being obsessed with the solution, what if you learn to love problems? This way you’ll find a constant stream of opportunities for innovation. We build better products when we are open-minded and let problems guide our solutions.
The second rock is having an eye for trends. This may be a tough one, but it is important to keep your eyes and ears open to catch the trends around you — trends in consumption, deployments and people’s behaviors all dictate the next big disruption. Most successful PMs are unabashed mavericks looking to catch that next wave.
The third rock is being obsessively engaged and communicative. As a PM, never allow disconnects or gaps between you and your customers, or the engineers and designers who build your products. Constantly communicating with both is critical for a product manager’s success.
I personally feel that it is extremely important to stay current on the technical field that one works in.”
From a technical perspective, what skills have you found to be most important in your role and what steps do you take to continue developing those skills?
Product management is part art and part science. The science is all about the requirements — the customer needs, marketplace dynamics, growth metrics, analytical thinking, OKRs and so on. It is cultivating the art of product management that I consider most important. This includes all the emotional quotient aspects of product management, such as empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, inspiring others and caring deeply for the people around you. I am growing these skills every day as I interact with different teams and it is the most fascinating part of my job here at Meraki.
I also find that domain expertise for product managers gets downplayed a lot. While it may not be a requirement going into a PM role, I personally feel that it is extremely important to stay current on the technical field that one works in. Data accessibility might be very high these days, but I make sure to stay informed on what is going on in my space by reading tech news, journals and updates every night.
What are the top three traits a person needs to be a great PM?
The first trait is a problem-solving mindset. To me, this is the most important trait —not just regarding the features being built, but how to approach conversations with stakeholders and customers. PMs need to think critically to get to the real problem — not just symptoms — and have the creativity to find solutions.
The second trait is empathy. Being able to put yourself in the shoes of your users or customers is a must in order to understand what problems they’re facing, what frustrates them about your product and what provides moments of delight.
The third trait is communication. The ability to effectively communicate is essential because you could have amazing ideas for the future of the product, but if you’re not able to get buy-in for your vision, none of that matters.
A lot of a PM’s job is delivering bad news and if you’re not doing that well, it’s easy to become the bad guy. It is critical to repeat the problem back to the stakeholder to demonstrate that we’re listening and actually understand their issues — it’s easier to get on the same page when all the cards are on the table.
You have to be comfortable with not having the answers at the start, but you also need to push yourself to learn.”
From a technical perspective, what skills have you found to be most important in your role and what steps do you take to continue developing those skills?
The first skill is being able to understand and work with data. The technical aspect of this role is being able to write queries in SQL or an equivalent, but the other side is about understanding how to interact with data, rather than just being an expert in a specific language. This skill is critical for a PM as we need to understand how features are being used and how widespread issues are in order to create metrics to inform decisions. This is especially important when planning out how you’re going to measure the success of a new feature.
Other than that skill, you should also get as close as possible to what your developers are working on. PMs should be willing to get their hands dirty in order to fill the gaps in their knowledge. For me, this meant asking my machine learning as many questions as possible, including book recommendations. You have to be comfortable with not having the answers at the start, but you also need to push yourself to learn. On some teams, that might mean reading up on email scripting languages so you can update an email template yourself, or researching an API to make sure it gives the data points that you need.
