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You Can't Be A Complete Product Manager Without These Skills

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are heading off to your product management job when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most product managers are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

Can You Communicate?

All too often, we marketing folks assume that good communication skills simply means that you have the ability to get up in front of a group of people and deliver a speech without bursting into flames. Yes, this is good skill to have, but a product manager has to have more.

Remember, communication is a two-way street and not only does a product manager need to be able to tell others what to do, but you are also going to have to be able to listen to what others are telling you.

No, we’re not talking about having the ability to sit there and listen when someone else is talking to you just waiting for them to pause so that you can start talking again. Instead, a product manager needs to be able to listen, process what has been said, and then ask good, pointed questions that will help get to the bottom of any discussion.

Just to round things out, a product manager also needs to have the communication skill that will allow them to “close” a discussion. This is when you ask a final question and then have the strength to keep you mouth closed and allow the other person to provide an answer. This is how you wrap things up cleanly.

Promote, Promote, Promote!

All too often product managers seem to have a “build it and they will come” sort of attitude. They believe that if they do a good job then the rest of the company will realize it and their value to the company will increase. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

What product managers need to be doing is constantly promoting both themselves and their product. Now you have to be careful here, note that I didn’t say “bragging”. The difference is subtle, but important.

One way that a product manager can show the value of both his position as well as the value that his / her product brings to the company is to become the thought leader on all things about the market that the product addresses. By researching what drives the market and then taking the time to educate the rest of the company about what customers are really looking for, both the product manager and their product will become recognized as a valuable resource.

Make A Friend (or Two)

Within the world of marketing, there is often a “loner” attitude that many of us hold: I can do it all by myself. As a product manager, you need to stop thinking this way and start making as many contacts as you can.

A product manager is only as strong as his / her network and that means taking the time to develop real relationships with as many people as possible. Not all product managers have this skill.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to become a successful product manager, you’ve got some work to do. There are a set of skills that you’ll need to develop in order to ensure that both your career and your product get the kind of positive attention that you both deserve.

In order to become a successful product manager, you’re going to have to have the ability to be a good two-way communicator. You’ll have to learn to spend your time tirelessly promoting both your product’s value as well as your own value to the company. Finally, you are going to have to get good at that critical job skill: networking.

None of these three skills are impossible to do. However, the key to being a successful product manager is to get good at doing all three at the same time…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Which of these three skills do you think is the most important for a product manager to have?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Every product manager likes to think that once their customer has purchased their product, that’s the end of the story. The reality is just a bit different: for a whole bunch of reasons, our customers can change their mind about buying our product and decide to return it. What’s a product manager to do when this happens?

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Product Mangers Can Turn Time Into Their Friend

Dang – just where does the time seem to go? I don’t know about you but as of late I seem to be running out of time or just simply running behind more often than in the past. I’d like to blame the current turmoil in the financial markets; however, that’s not the problem. There are many, many more people who are better qualified than I talk about time management (I’m sorta a fan of GTD myself), but I do have one secret that I’d like to share with you. No promises, but if you believe what I’m going to share with you and if you take the time to implement it, then there is a pretty good chance that you’ll become the best product manager in the world. Sound interesting? Then read on…

Forget having enough time to do everything that you have to get done. Instead, think for just a moment about projecting an image of being in control of your time. What do you think would happen if everyone who encountered you was left with the impression that you had it all under control? Would your boss be impressed? Would your team be more willing to do what you tell them to do? Could you run meeting more efficiently? Would you just get more respect from everyone? You may be laughing right now and saying that a thin veneer of control put over your normal out-of-control personality is not going to accomplish anything. However, that’s where I think that you would be wrong…

If you think back a bit, you might remember that there was a book called The Secret that was very popular awhile ago. In a nutshell, the secret was that if you can imagine something, then you can make it happen. This applies to making others believe that you have control over your time. However, I’m going get just a bit more specific here and give you one single change that if you implement it will have a dramatic and positive impact on your life: start showing up early.

What this means in the day-to-day life of a product manager is that you need to start to show up for meeting early (5-10 minutes will do) and even more importantly, you need to start to jump on call bridges early (5 minutes will do here). I don’t know about you, but up until just recently I was a constantly late shower-upper. I would slide into calls 5 minutes late and hope that whoever was running the meeting would not stop the call and ask who had just joined when they heard the “beep” that announced my arrival. I’d slug through the call and then slink off when it was over no better or worse for the time spent on the call.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally showed up for a call early. You can imagine how surprised I was when there was nobody on the bridge when I joined (there was that moment where I felt that I needed to check to make sure that I had the right call-in numbers). What happened next really caught my attention: other people started to join. These just happened to be people that I had been trying with no luck to get in touch with. I had very quick, very short conversations with three of them as they joined and got commitments from them to send me answers and materials that I desperately needed. As others joined I exchanged small talk with them and reconnected with people that I knew but had not seen in a long time. When the call’s leader joined he fumbled around for a bit and this gave me time to ask a very good, penetrating question about what he wanted to accomplish on this call and that got everyone involved in a discussion. Man, it was almost like I was running the show!

Based on the success of this accidental event, I started showing up early for all of my meetings that week and found that the same sequence of events repeated itself. Others looked at me as though I was in charge, I connected with other people who were in the meeting, and I was able to make face-to-face requests for support and materials that were never turned down. Wow – who knew that getting what you wanted could be so easy?

Yes, I realize that showing up early for meetings and calls won’t solve all of life’s problems. However, it sure seems to make a lot of little things run much easier. When you couple that with the fact that it’s so very easy to do, why not give it a try and see what it does for you?

When do you show up for meetings & calls – early or late? When you are the one who is running the meeting do you show up early or do you still come late? Have you always been this way or did something cause you to be an early/late person? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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King Solomon Had The #1 Skill That Product Managers Need

Yes, I will tell you what this skill is; however, do you think that you can guess it before I do? I’m sure that you can come up with the standard list of leadership skills that every product manager has (or at least should have): able to deal with pressure, able to lead people, vision, positive attitude, creativity, etc.

However, those would all be good to have, but none of them would be the #1 skill that a product manager needs to have. Give up? The answer is …

Good Judgment.

The ability to make good decisions is the #1 skill that any product manager needs to have because making decisions is such a large part of what we do each and every day. Two well known business thinkers / authors also agree with me: Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis.

Noel and Warren say that judgment can be broken up into three different sets of skills: picking who will be on your team (people), picking what challenges you take on (strategy), and picking what to do when tough times hit (crisis decisions).

People, people, people. Decisions about which people a product manger is going to interact with and have on his / her team are THE most important decisions that they will ever make.

Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe Jack Welsh who said that the thing that he failed at the most during his storied career was moving too slowly in making people judgments even when he had all of the data that he needed.

Tichy reports that when he’s giving speeches he’ll ask the audience what the worse judgment that they every made was and invariably about 75% of the people will say that they were about people. If a product manager can get the right people on his / her team, then they have solved more than half of the problem.

Next comes what product strategy a product manger wants to pursue. In our world, more often than not this comes down to picking what types of customers we want to go after with our products.

Our sales teams are all too often filled with salespeople who will happily go after every customer that they can get a meeting with. However, this is a great way to waste time until all of the money is gone. Picking the right customers from the get-go and going after them aggressively is what a good product manager makes happen.

Bad things happen and a product manager who is ready for them is a product manager who has real-world survival skills. When the whole world seems to have flipped upside down (like when the stock market drops 700 points in a single day!), a product manager who can remain calm and still make good decisions is worth his/her weight in gold.

Now this ability is probably as much an art as it is a science; however, at the end of the day it always requires that the product manger know all of the available facts about the situation. To put it simply, the ability to collect the facts is one of the simple secrets behind a product manager’s ability to make good judgments.

How good of a job of making judgments do you think that you do? Do you feel that people, strategy, or crisis decision making is your strongest skill? Have you ever made a bad people judgment? What was the result of this judgment? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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