The 6 Most Critical Skills for Product Managers
Read on my website / Read time: 5 minutes
"What technical skills should I learn to earn the respect of the Engineering team?"
Too many product managers invest their time, energy, and cash in developing technical skills or perfecting their agile/scrum knowledge.
To a certain degree, this is understandable. We consider Engineering and Design key partners. We need them to help us develop products for our customers. We spend a lot of time with them. Engineers and Designers can be prickly and sensitive. And many folks get into product management through previously being an engineer, designer, or project manager, or through Agile or Lean training.
As a result, they're taught that being a product manager involves:
- Surveying users and analyzing user metrics.
- "Validating assumptions".
- Identifying and collecting feature ideas.
- Writing requirements / user stories.
- Applying a formula to prioritize a backlog.
- Optimizing for time with engineering - stand ups, sprint planning, grooming, technical design meetings, release planning, retrospectives.
- Trying to please everyone.
Business skills, such as go-to-market, how to commercialize products, financial analysis, or business strategy are either not learned or taught via a quick overview of the Business Model Canvas or something similar.
As a result, most product managers approach career development backwards:
- Develop technical skills.
- Learn agile / scrum, pursue a certification.
- Perfect development process.
- Sweat development velocity metrics.
- Continue building technical and operational skills.
And short shrift is given to the things that actually make us successful as product managers: customer insights, business management, communication, and leadership.
It's not uncommon for these product managers to feel themselves pulled in a hundred directions, find their work under appreciated, question their own value, and find their career stagnating.
Sure, we need enough technical understanding to have an intelligent conversation with engineering.
But trying to match our engineering team's level of technical skills isn't productive.
Being able to speak at the code level may get their respect in terms of your technical know-how, but they actually won't respect you as a product manager, because you're not giving them what they actually need.
A CTO once told me, "I don't need your help designing the solution. I need you to tell me the customer context and business reason for WHY we need to do it at all."
Our job as product managers isn't to design the technical solution. Our job is to provide R&D with the WHO, WHAT, and WHY.
- WHO do we need to solve for?
- WHAT is the problem we need to solve for?
- WHY is it important to them that it's solved? WHY is it important for us to solve? WHY is it important for us to solve it now?
Following this, we need to:
- Sell others on our product ideas, plans, and priorities.
- Get them to follow-through.
- Communicate results.
Through numerous jobs and companies over 25+ years, and having hired, mentored, grown, and promoted 100s of product people, here are the 6 most essential skills of product management I've identified - the ones that truly distinguish the most impactful product managers from the pack:
- Customer insights
- Strategic planning
- Finance & economics
- Positioning & messaging
- Leadership
- Communication
Let's discuss each. There are tons of ways to learn each and they all take time to master. So, for each one, I'll provide at least one thing you can do to give you a running start.
The 6 most critical skills of product management:
1. Customer insights.
The ability to get customer insights is one of the most vital product manager skills. It goes well beyond just surveying users or analyzing user metrics.
It involves dedicated time listening to customers, asking questions, and deeply understanding their worldviews.
If you need help, check out my Customer Discovery Toolkit. You'll get all the customer discovery tactics I've used to grow my products to $100M+. You'll get a complete playbook of practical and immediately implementable strategies, including templates and scripts, and questions for different types of interviews, to help you get a jump start on your customer conversations and develop your own game plan to extract maximum customer insights.
2. Strategic Planning
Strategy is nothing more than a plan of action to achieve a goal, particularly under conditions of uncertainty. It's a simple definition, but not easy to craft.
It's not about having a detailed GANTT-style project plan. (Bottom left quadrant.) It's a form of applied, holistic problem solving or goal-oriented logic.
There is already a ton written about the importance of having a strategy. (Just Google it or grab a book off Amazon.) As product managers, it's important we develop a strategic mindset. In addition to the many courses and books available, here are actions you can take this week to develop your strategic acumen:
- Analyze case studies and real-world examples and tease them apart.
- Learn how to utilize strategic frameworks.
- Practice critical thinking.
- Learn about trade-offs and the difference between opportunity costs and sunk costs.
- Start developing a high-level plan beyond the current quarter.
- Dedicate an hour reviewing all the customer insights you've gained over the last 3-6 months. Identify any key insights or trends and think about how that may impact your product strategy.
- Think about how daily actions and decisions connect to the longer-term strategy and goals.
- Get a mentor.
- DO! As you learn, apply strategic thinking to your work - that presentation, roadmap, competitive analysis, requirements doc, plan, etc. that you're working on - get feedback, and iterate.
3. Finance & Economics
Understanding finance and economics- and, particularly, unit economics - is one of the greatest super powers in business.
- Finance will teach you money flow.
- Economics will teach you about incentives, trade-offs, and human decision making.
- Unit economics make it possible to project whether your product will be successful.
In 3 articles, here, here, and here, I provide a primer on financial and economic metrics every product manager should know by heart.
Additionally, every product manager should learn these financial analyses:
- Cost/benefit analysis
- TAM analysis
- Revenue estimation
- Break-even analysis
- NPV and IRR
Investopedia and Corporate Finance Institute are useful resources I use all the time to educate myself.
4. Positioning & Messaging
Because many of us come from technical backgrounds or are technical in nature, we tend to gravitate toward the bits and bytes, data and metrics of our products. So we ignore market positioning and messaging, assuming it's Marketing job to take care of these.
The reality is that customers buy value propositions. Not features.
So it's not about being able to describe our features in functional terms. The real win is in being able to describe them in terms of:
- The benefits and outcomes they will deliver to customers, and
- How they're different from the competition.
Features don't create long-term success of a product. A unique value proposition does.
Certainly, taking a course or reading a book will help. Additionally, two of the easiest ways to get started are:
- Learning copywriting and practicing it in your every day writing - in emails, in documents, in presentations, etc.
- Spending time with your marketing team.
- Find a mentor in marketing or sales who is excellent at messaging.
5. Leadership
We have no direct reports. Even those in product leadership don't have the rest of the organization reporting to them. It's natural for PMs to feel like:
- I can't make final decisions.
- I need approval for everything.
- I have no control.
As a result, it's easy for us to feel like we have no power. Many PMs and even product leaders give up their agency as a result. This is a mistake.
Leadership is NOT about control.
Leadership is about influence.
And influence comes from connection.
Because no one reports to us, product management requires high levels of leadership to convince, align, coordinate, and move people.
Product Managers are actually best positioned to be leaders because:
- The product manager is the one who knows customer pain deeply.
- The product manager is the bridge between business goals and technical reality.
- The product manager is the go-to person for "What should we do?"
- The product manager's primary currency is communication.
Learning leadership is easy. Practicing it is very hard. (Which is why so many suck at it.) And requires you to do it every day, all the time.
Here are some simple ways to get started:
- Always show up prepared.
- Do what you say you'll do.
- Stay focused on the goal.
- Make others successful.
- Practice critical thinking.
- Practice empathy.
- Develop ace communication skills.
- Get a mentor who is an awesome leader.
Two books that had an early influence on my development as a leader are The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and First, Break All The Rules.
Simon Sinek and Gary Vaynerchuck are two leading speakers on leadership that I respect.
6. Communication
Being great at communication - written and especially verbal - is the biggest super power you can have. Think about people you follow. Inevitably, they're very strong communicators. In product management, communication is the primary currency on which we trade.
Ace communication skills help us:
- Sell our ideas.
- Mobilize people and teams.
- Gain alignment.
- Foster engagement.
- Inspire action.
- Make complex concepts more accessible and relatable.
- Avoid misunderstandings and resolve conflicts.
- Build resilience by framing setbacks as stepping stones and encouraging a mindset where people see challenges as opportunities.
- Improve productivity.
- Make us more presentable.
- Help us earn credibility and be respected.
I highly encourage you to take a course or find a coach who can help you get better at communication. In the meantime, here are 7 skills you can begin practicing immediately to up your communication game:
- Active listening: Focus on what the other person is saying - and not saying! - rather than formulating your response.
- Be fully present: Put away anything that can distract you, like your phone. Place all your attention on the person in front of you.
- Be aware of nonverbal communication: Nonverbal cues can have between 65 and 93 percent more impact than the spoken word. And we are more likely to believe the nonverbal signals over spoken words if the two are in disagreement. The best leaders are especially adept at reading nonverbal cues. Watch this podcast with body language expert, Vanessa Van Edwards.
- Be self-aware: Be mindful of your own tone, voice, and non-verbal cues. Getting a business coach or even taking an acting class can help.
- Be brief: Provide enough information to be clear and concise, but don't leave anything out.
- Be patient: Not everyone communicates in the same way, so take the time to understand others' communication styles.
- Check for understanding: Ask for feedback and invite questions or clarifications.
Summary
Product Management involves many skills. The 6 most critical are:
- Customer insights
- Strategic planning
- Finance & economics
- Positioning & messaging
- Leadership
- Communication
These supersede technical skills. Remember: our job in product management is to manage the PRODUCT, not the technology.
Here are some bonus skills that will further elevate your effectiveness:
- Sales: You don't need to become a sales person, but learning sales skills will make you better at everything from understanding customers to pitching your ideas to handling rejection to human psychology. In reality, all of us at all times are selling.
- Negotiation: To help you negotiate your product plans, resourcing, performance appraisals, promotions, jobs, anything. Here is a Masterclass from Chris Voss, former FBI lead hostage negotiator, I highly recommend.
- Project management: I don't mean getting a PMP certification. I mean the ability to create execution plans and to execute against them.
- Capital budgeting: a financial planning process used by companies to evaluate and select projects to invest in. (Something product management does all the time!) It involves analyzing a project's costs and cash flows to determine if the expected return meets a set benchmark. Examples: net present value (NPV), discounted cash flow (DCF), and payback analysis. Your Finance department uses these all the time to assess the viability and resourcing of your product. So good for you to know too.
- Executive presence: a combination of behaviors and communication skills that allow you to project confidence, authority, and self-assurance without arrogance to inspire trust and motivate others. It's your ability to remain composed, communicate clearly, project a sense that you can take control of difficult, unpredictable situations, and make tough decisions and hold your own with other smart, talented, or strong-willed people, especially at the executive level.
- Storytelling: Human beings love stories. Even in business, everything is about telling the right story. (Usually, it's a story about money.) Storytelling is an advanced leadership superpower that can enable leaders to influence, motivate, and inspire others. Being a good storyteller will help you communicate a vision, connect with others, and inspire action.
- Improv: Improv will teach you everything from being able to think on your feet, think outside the box, teamwork, and how to use your voice and body for effective communication. It will help you unleash creativity energy you didn't know you had and build your self-confidence. And it will bring unbridled joy in your life.
Your action item this week
Every journey begins one step at a time. Which is the one skill you will invest in developing this week?
Then pick another one the following week. Then the next, and then the next. Before you know it, you'll have found yourself transforming from a "technical" delivery manager to a world-class business innovator!
