Product Management skills

& what skills I am working on this year

Recently, I have been pondering what are some of the skills a Product Manager should possess and develop during the course of career.
I tried my best to consolidate them into 3 broad buckets.
1. Problem Solving
2. Decision Making
3. People Management

A radar chart is a good way visual representation to spot the gaps for improvement. A good thing about the Radar chart is that you can add more skills to this polygon. Credit: Online Radar chart maker

1. Problem Solving

As a product manger, everyday is gonna be filled with problems of some level. Be it setting top 3 goals for the day, prioritizing between 2 urgent-important tasks, or dearth of resources in development/marketing/design teams.
Different kinds of Problem solving skills I see as important to develop as a PM are,

• Design thinking (user-first/customer first approach)
• Lean approach (hypothesis, test, analyze, interate)
• Analytical thinking (top-down, bottoms-up)
• Strategic thinking (SWOT, Porter’s 5 Forces, Strategy Canvas, Business model canvas)
• Prioritization of tasks (Effort/customer value matrix, Important/Urgent Matrix)
• Time management (20 mintues/task approach)

2. Decision Making

I believe that Product Managers should have the ability to make judegement based on both data and qualitative data. In many cases, “what people ‘say’ they do and what they ‘actually do’ might be ‘two’ completely ‘different’ things.” While quantitative data(eg. product spefic metrics like ‘Daily Active Users’(DAU) or product experience metrics like ‘Net Promotor Score’(NPS)) gives us a really good picture of ‘what’ is actually happenning when users interact with the product, qualitative data(customer interviews and reviews) might tell us ‘why’ users behave a certain way they do.

• Qualitative approach— ability to ask the right questions, testing hypothesis with customers & users, synthesizing the the key findings, analyzing to look for insights and the ability to write product requirements (or user ‘stories’ as in most software product teams)
• Quanitative approach — data-driven decision making, ability to summarize trends from data and derive new learnings from data.

In some cases, the only way to understand users problems might be through observation of how users actually interact with the product(‘ethnographic studies’ &‘user testing’ methods). I call this 3rd approach to decision making as ‘observational approach’

3. People Management

Some of important people management skills a PM should possess are,

• Active listening
• Communication skills
  — Writing Skills
  — Speaking Skills (being a great story teller)
  — Presentation Skills (Story telling using digital supporting content)
• Leadership skills (empowering the team and enabling a creative work culture)
• Stakeholder Management
• Negotiation
• Project Management (being ‘organized’ and ‘goal-driven’)

This year, I have decided to work on my people management skills. Some of my OKRs(key results in the brackets) for the year-2021 are,

1. Develop my communication skills (If I can tell a story and hold people’s attention for 5 minutes without any distraction)
2. Improve my writing skills (If all my articles receive at least 25+ reactions on an average)
3. Shape my mindset and feel fully confident that I can be a successful entrepreneur. (Wake up consistently before 8:30 am for a month. Increase weight by at least 6 pounds.)

~Rahul vignesh Sekar