Skills and processes to thrive as a product manager
Recently, I’ve been invited to speak at an event about the daily life of a Product Manager. That gave me the opportunity to share with other people the experiences and learnings I gathered along these last 7 years in which I’ve been acting as a Product Manager. This text is based on this presentation, which was in its turn based on multiple articles and books I’ve read throughout my carreer, but mostly in my own experience.
In order to talk about which skills and processes a Product Manager should have, it’s important to take a step back and think in first place: what does it mean to be a Product Manager (a.k.a. PM)? If you google “Product Manager definition”, one of the results you’ll find is this one from Aha
Product managers are responsible for guiding the success of a product and leading the cross-functional team that is responsible for improving it
I like this defition because it touches two fundamental points: success and improvement of a product. Bottom-line, a PM must make sure her/his product is doing well — and getting better each day. Once I heard during an informal conversation that a PM is ultimately responsible for “moving the bar up”. Or, in other words, she or he should choose a metric and try to increase it — or decrease, if you’re talking about churn, for instance. Which brings us to the main point of this text: what do you need to do and know in order to build a successful product?
Data Analysis
The first commandment of a Product Manager should be: You only improve what you measure. Therefore, you only know if your product is getting better if your success metric is getting better. For example, if you manage a subscription based website, you know your product is improving if the number of subscriptions is increasing over time.
Any respectable company will base its discussions in numbers. If you want to be able to take part in discussions based on numbers, you need to know how to understand and get information from them. That’s Data Analysis.
Love your product
Your product is like your son. Everyday you should be checking on it, see how things are going and what it needs at the moment. This can be done through different ways: checking a metrics dashboard, measuring its SEO performance, monitoring its presence in social networks and so on. The point is: your product should always be in your thoughts — and in your heart.
Use your product
Besides loving your product, you also need to use it, to experience it as if you were a normal user. In the company I work for, we say that the Product Manager has to be the top user of the product he or she builds. You have to know your product better than anyone else — and there’s no better way to achieve that than simply using your product more than anyone else. Using your product should be part of your routine. If you want to, you can book a time in your agenda once or twice a week to force you to do that.
Keep the balance
Being a Product Manager, you’ll face the daily challenge of having to keep one eye on the present and other on the future. The eye on the present must think short-term (from today until the following weeks). It watches the day-to-day of your team, how they’re delivering and if the processes implemented are being useful to everyone’s needs. It also oversees ongoing demands from other areas, if that’s your case.
The eye on the future thinks long-term. It takes care of the product, instead of the process. Instead of delivery, it’s worried with planning. It thinks about what you and your team will be doing next quarter and next year — sometimes even defining goals for these periods. And it tends to demand more cognitive effort.
The true challenge, in my opinion, is being able to dedicate time for each one of these two responsibilities. If you don’t make a true effort to keep the balance, it’s very likely that short-term demands will consume all of your working hours, leaving no time or energy to think long-term.
Benchmarking
There are many reasons why you should benchmark other sites — simply checking what your competitors are doing should be enough, but there are others.
To start, your user tends to spend most of their time online using other sites — I recently heard that from someone of our research team and it was trully eye-opening for me. Because of that, using other websites in order to build your product can diminish your users’ learning curve.
Another reason to benchmark other sites is: no matter what your problem is, someone else out there already faced the same problem — or something similar. That’s why you should check other websites in order to see how other people already solved your problem. This can save you time and money.
However, always take into consideration that context is everything. The website you’re benchmarking can be in a different market, a different maturity level, a different strategical moment, and so on. Thus, observe them, but observe them wisely.
People Management
We all know that no man is an island. However, this is probably more true to a Product Manager than it is for other people. As I said before, the PM is responsible for the success of the product she or he builds. However, she or he doesn’t design nor develop. As a Product Manager, you have to know how to sell your vision to all the stakeholders involved in your product — what includes your team, obviously.
The Head of Product of my company uses the analogy of a sports coach to explain the role of a PM in a team: you don’t play, but you’re responsible for the result of the game. Because of that, learning about team building, people management and leadership can help you a lot bringing people together around your vision.
Use different hats and speak different languages
A Product Manager must learn how to speak “different languages”. During your daily activities, you’ll be dealing with all sorts of people: designers, developers, C-level managers, clients, users, etc. Each one of these groups have different experiences, formations and ways of seeing the world. And you should feel comfortable talking to everyone of them.
Besides, you also need to learn how to use different hats — which is one of the perks of anyone acting as an intermediate. Being a PM, you must be the voice of the client to the team and the voice of the team to the client. Each person from the groups mentioned above will transmit to you a different vision of your product and you must be able to unite all of them in one single strategy.
If you want more…
I hope this text helped you having a better idea about the work of a Product Manager and the skills you can and should develop if you want to become one. In case you want to learn more, I recommend following topics on the subject here on Medium (for real, there’s always something interesting to read). If you want something more dense, this post recommends some really good books on the topic.
Finally, if you already work as a Product Manager, I’d be very happy to know your thoughts about my text. As I said, this post is pretty much based in my own experience and can always be complemented with other people’s views and opinions.
