Before I started my career in product management, I often wondered about the core skills that were required to be an effective product manager. In the last 5 years of working on various products, I’ve come to realize that the fundamental skills that make one an effective product manager are the following:
- Strategy & Big Picture Thinking
- Product Sense
- Structuring Problems & Analytics
- Soft Skills & Communication
- Attention to Detail, and
- Project Execution
I was able to develop some of these skills based on my educational background in engineering and prior professional experience in sales. And I have had to spend considerable time on some of the other skills in order to understand them and get better at them. In this post, I’ll discuss what I have done (and continue doing) to get better at each of these skills.
1. Strategy & Big Picture Thinking
Effective product managers don’t just think of new features and implement them.They need to have strong business acumen as well. They need to understand the market, competitors, positioning etc. from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. Understanding what makes a business successful and how the other functional areas of a business operate helps in gaining a holistic view rather than viewing everything through just a product lens. This then flows into how one should innovate and build further on the product. Product managers bereft of business understanding will ultimately end up ceding the leadership of their product to a competitor.
How I got better at this
The concept of strategy and big picture thinking did not come naturally to me. I’ve got better at this over the years primarily by reading about the SaaS industry and understanding the various steps that SaaS startups undertake at different stages in order to progress to the next level of growth. Following are the blogs that I refer to to improve my understanding of the industry. Please note that most of these blogs focus on SaaS and don’t necessarily cover consumer tech startups: SaaStr, Tomasz Tunguz, Point Nine, Both Sides of the Table, Ken Norton, Jason Cohen and Groove. In addition to these blogs, I’ve also benefited from books such as Rand Fishkin’s Lost & Founder and Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Another way to get better at this is by actually working directly with CEOs or founders of startups. This practical experience will help shape your understanding of the strategies companies use to build successful products and businesses. I’ve worked closely with the founders of both WebEngage and BrowserStack and I have seen both the startups evolve over the years into larger successful startups. I have been privy to some of the business and growth challenges that both the companies faced, the deliberations that the founders went through and what they ultimately did from both a business and product perspective in order to build a successful business.
2. Product Sense
This is an all encompassing category that covers many different things. Essentially this helps answer the question — can you identify what makes a product stand out and can you carry those learnings into building a great product?
There are many things that can make a product stand out. It could be — the business problem that the product is solving in a unique way, a highly intuitive onboarding experience, beautiful design (color scheme, fonts, button interactions etc.), superior UX and well thought-out interaction flows, content used on the website etc. Are you able to examine which of these factors make a product stand out? And can you then channel these learnings towards your own product?
How I got better at this
Clearly, it’s not possible for anyone to be a natural at all these different skill-sets. I have made a concerted effort over the years to improve my product sense. I have developed this skill primarily by examining in great detail SaaS products I look up to such as Mailchimp, Front, Asana, Dropbox, Slack, Segment, Amplitude and Wistia. I have studied and used their product dashboard as well as their marketing website to understand in excruciating detail what makes these products stand out compared to others. In the process, I have also studied design systems of Mailchimp, Atlassian and a few other SaaS products to know the design foundations on which their products were built. Additionally, books such as Refactoring UI, have also helped develop my product sense from a UI and UX perspective.
3. Structuring Problems & Analytics
Product managers tend to solve complex problems on a fairly regular basis. Unless you’re able to structure your thoughts around a problem, and then decide a way forward, your solution will neither be elegant nor simple. An analytical bent of mind will help you sift through data and analyze it from many different perspectives in order to identify the problem, and structure your solution.
For example, if you’re tasked with improving user retention for your product, simply listing down a bunch of ideas and then working on each of those ideas one-by-one is not going to guarantee an improvement in your retention metrics. The objective is not to fail fast. The objective is to research the problem, structure your thoughts, and then understand how you can use quantitative and qualitative data to fix the bottlenecks in your funnel. In our retention example above, unless you understood the complete lifecycle of a user and the many different reasons why users churn, you would never be able to come up with a list of solutions and the order in which you should tackle them.
How I got better at this
My educational background in engineering has helped me understand how to structure problems and how to analyze data effectively to solve problems. In addition, my practical experience of solving such complex problems at WebEngage and BrowserStack has helped hone my analytical skills. Based on the product and growth problems I’m solving at work, I tend to read in detail on topics such as growth, engagement, conversion, retention etc. I search on Google for these topics and then read various blog posts that cover these topics to form my own independent view of the problem, approach and possible solutions. I then employ the strategy to figure out what actually works and what doesn’t.
For our retention example above, I wrote a three-part series on how SaaS startups could improve user retention. This was possible only because I spent weeks agonizing over this problem at BrowserStack. Working on this problem and more importantly, writing about it helped distill my thoughts such that I could structure the problem better and create solutions accordingly.
I don’t have any recommendations for blogs that can help you get better at your analytical and problem solving skills. I can however point to a couple of blogs — ForEntrepreneurs and Sixteen Ventures — that cover some of the growth related topics I have mentioned above.
4. Communication & Soft Skills
Product management is possibly the only function in a company that works with teams across various functions such as engineering, design, marketing, sales, success, support etc. on a regular basis. One day you’re trying to convince the management on a potentially disruptive product feature, another day you are debating the UX flows with the design team and on yet another day you might find yourself in a very tough situation where you have to justify to the engineering team why you cannot implement a feature they have spent months working on.
There are just so many aspects of soft-skills and communication in product management that this deserves a separate blog post in itself. The following list is by no means an exhaustive list of the soft-skills you need to have for a product management role:
- How to listen
- How to empathize
- How to ask questions
- How to convince
- How to influence
- How to sell
- How to negotiate
- How to say no
- How to present
- How to write briefly and concisely
How I got better at this
If there is one skill I wish to develop further and get better at, it is Communication & Soft Skills. Despite my prior professional background in sales, I have a long way to go before I can be content with my expertise in this skill. Five year of sales did burnish my soft-skills to an extent but I still consider myself a novice. I believe that a stint in a customer-facing role such as sales, success or support can help develop some of these skills. Even if the stint is as short as a week or a month, you are bound to emerge wiser from this experience.
I have often come across recommendations for books such as How to Win Friends & Influence People and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I have read both these books and I could not recommend them more. Both these books have nuggets of wisdom that I have been able to employ in my professional as well as personal life.
My writing skills leave much to be desired. Until I read Manhattan’s Sentence Correction Guide while preparing for GMAT, I wasn’t even aware of the number of mistakes I used to make when writing in English. This book has helped me gain a strong foundation of the rules that one needs to follow when writing in English.
5. Attention to Detail
Product managers need to have an eye for the detail in order to build great products. A product will never have the finish and the polish you desire unless you’re sweating the details. If you find yourself saying This is just one extra field in the form. How does one extra field really matter?, then you’re not sweating the details. The best products have designers taking care of every pixel on the page. The best products have content writers investing considerable time and effort in achieving consistency in language and tone throughout the product — content in the product dashboard, content used for marketing, content used in sales decks etc.
Do you admire Slack as a product? Well, check out their detailed workflow on how Slack decides whether to send you a notification or not.
Someone at Slack (or a few people at Slack) has spent many hours in figuring out this rather simple scenario of whether a user should receive a notification or not. All the magic happens behind the scenes and is invisible to the user. Users only see that Slack works perfectly for them and slot it under the great products category.
How I got better at this
I try. I sweat the little details as much as I can. It’s a work-in-progress and I do not have any suggestions on how one can get better at this. From time to time, I look at Little Big Details for inspiration and I then marvel at the minor details that people have spent considerable time on, in order to build a great product experience.
6. Project Execution
What good is an idea for a new product feature unless you can work with your team to implement it? As much as the ideation and research stage of building products interest you, you have to develop a keen interest in the execution phase as well. You might have the greatest product idea that solves a critical business problem but if you’re not ready to open the hood and get your hands dirty with the execution, then you’ll likely find it challenging to build a product. I do not mean that product managers have to learn to code. But you have to get deeply involved with the engineering and design teams to build the product. This means that you actively participate in the daily stand-ups for engineering and design teams, follow up with people to get things done, maintain the pressure of working towards a deadline, keep the momentum of the teams high, hold people accountable for what they deliver, take extreme ownership in ensuring that the quality of the output is always high etc.
How I got better at this
I got better at this primarily by taking complete ownership of whatever I’m working on. If there is a bug in the product, it is my responsibility. If the team is not shipping on time, it is my responsibility. If there is a breakdown in communication between teams, it is my responsibility. I have realized that once I take ownership, I do everything in my capacity to ensure that things move forward. If you take ownership and you still realize that things are not moving as you had wanted them to, perhaps you are not actually taking complete ownership or perhaps not everything is under your control. There are times when I have realized that certain things are not under my control and in such cases, I do everything in my capacity to ensure that the leaders of those functions realize their shortcomings and can make changes in how their teams work.
In closing, I also wanted to mention a few other blogs I follow that have helped me become a better product manager. The authors of these blogs discuss topics across various areas discussed above. You might want to check these blogs and subscribe to their newsletter: Hiten Shah, Jackie Bavaro, Sachin Rekhi, Julie Zhuo, Mathilde Collin and Boz.
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