Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. What makes a good product manager? I’ve been obsessed with this question. It’s why I started this blog. As a practitioner, I want to master my craft. As a consultant and coach, I want to help you master your craft. But how do we do that without first understanding what makes us good?
Building great products requires a broad skill set. We need to know how to explore a problem space, uncover unmet needs, design feasible solutions, validate those solutions. We also need to be able to work with engineers, sales, management, and so many others. We need to develop technical proficiencies so that we have a firm grasp of what’s possible, allowing us to turn big ideas into actual products.
But is there a set of traits or skills that underlie all of these? Is there a set of skills that if we were to develop each one of them, would fuel our development in all of these other areas?
I don’t profess to have the definitive answer, but I’d like to propose a draft for discussion.
1. Empathy
Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
More and more we are starting to understand the importance of empathy. It underlies so many skills related to product management.
It helps you understand the problem you are trying to solve. It helps you sell the idea to management, engineers, sales. It helps you know which problems are big enough pain points to bother solving in the first place.
Like empathy, active listening is required to uncover unmet needs, to understand how to persuade and influence, and to really get to the root of an issue.
It’s easy for product to be ego-driven. But this will result in failure more often than not. To be a good product manager, you need to deliberately develop active listening skills so that your product becomes more about your users than about you.
3. Curiosity
It’s hard to be a genuine active listener without also being curious. A curious product manager will probe for more details, will ask clarifying questions, will take the time to learn the ins-and-outs of his or her subject domain.
A curious product manager will research his or her audience, stay current on technology trends, and will keep an eye on the competition.
4. Experimenter’s Mindset / Intellectual Honesty
When developing products, it is so easy to convince ourselves that we are right. But the reality is, more often than not, we are going to be wrong.
It is critically important that we operate from the assumption that we are wrong and design experiments to tell us what is truth.
But an experimenter’s mindset is not enough.
We also need intellectual honesty to act on the results of our experiments. Too often, it’s easy to explain away our results. To look for the explanation that allows us to still be right. We need to develop the habit of intellectual honesty to trust our process and trust our results, even when we are wrong.
5. Basic Understanding of Statistics
It’s hard to know what’s true without a basic understanding of statistics. I’m no math whiz, but I know enough to know what’s meaningful data and what should be ignored. Even if you run great experiments, if you don’t get the statistics right, you won’t learn anything meaningful.
6. Root Cause Analysis / High Rational IQ
Even with a well-defined experiment and great statistical analysis there are going to be many times when you have to dig deep to understand why you got the results that you did. Can you connect the dots?
Keith E. Stenovich introduces the concept of “rational intelligence” in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, a concept that seems to encompass judgment, critical thinking, and decision making.
Developing great products is nowhere near formulaic. More often than not you will have to proceed with incomplete data. You won’t always know why something happened. Keen critical thinking skills and the ability to get at the root cause are absolutely necessary.
This one might be a surprise to some of you. I don’t mean the ability to draw well. I mean the ability to draw well enough to explore and / or communicate an idea.
Very often the act of sketching an idea opens up new possibilities. We’ve all experienced the flow of ideas in front of a whiteboard.
More importantly, we have all experienced the clarity that comes from drawing out an idea rather than trying to describe it. When it comes to product ideas, a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
What do you think? Did I miss something? Did I include something that you wouldn’t? Please share in the comments.
Very helpful list. One of the dimensions I often wonder about is “Creativity”. I think there are many flavors of PMs, some leaning more toward operational aspects and others toward creative. What role do you think “Creativity” plays in “mastering the craft”?
Hi Chris,
Great question. Creativity is definitely important when it comes to building good products. However, I’m not sure that the product manager has to be the creative influence. I do think that the product manager needs to be the steward of the creative process. But I think saying the product manager has to be creative makes it too easy to thinking the product managers is solely responsible for the solution.
This gets a little at Jeff’s comment below. Creativity is both a trait and a process. Is it good for a product manager to be creative? Sure. If a product manager can effectively manage the creative process, do they need to score high on the creativity trait? Maybe not.
Teresa
I gave a presentation years ago that covered the Top Ten Traits of Good Product Managers (http://www.slideshare.net/jefflash/ten-traits-of-good-product-managers). There’s some overlap with your list, and if I was writing it today I’d probably make a few edits.
Incidentally, some of the things you list are more skills than traits (e.g. basic understanding of statistics) — both skills and traits are needed, but skills are MUCH easier to teach. (Some would argue that traits can’t be taught.)
Hi Jeff,
Yes, I am definitely mixing skills and traits. I hate that distinction. I get it. Traits are inherent and maybe immutable. Skills are learned. I guess when it comes to people development, I’m less concerned about traits and more concerned with skills. But I’m also skeptical about traits being immutable. I think you can learn more empathy, even though it is clearly a trait and not a skill. But I know the academic research on this mostly disagrees with me. So maybe I’m not being intellectually honest. 🙂
I just don’t like the idea of assuming we are just stuck where we currently are.
I like your list. You do a much better job of sticking to traits. I think there are a lot of connections between the two lists. It’s hard to be intellectually honest without self-awareness and humility. Innovativeness gets at Chris’ point about creativity and I think is a much better way to capture it.
Passion is an interesting one. I’d connect that to curiosity. It’s hard to be passionate about something without curiosity. The downside of the word passion, is that it’s meaning is loaded. We too easily get distracted by the idea of finding our passion and only working on products that we are passionate about. This might be too limiting. As long as I cultivate curiosity, I can probably work on a much broader set of things than just the things i am passionate about. Having said that, i can see the other side too. Maybe I can only do my best work if I’m passionate (not just curious) about a topic.
I love seeing persuasiveness on your list. That’s an often understated trait that is tremendously useful.
I could go on for days. I’ll stop there. Thanks for sharing!
Teresa
Hi Teresa, I dug into this as well a bit ago as well. I was interested to see if there was a clear order to 13 different skills and traits for a product manager. Whipping up a quick survey, I managed to get 19 responses. The results can be seen at: http://bit.ly/p5s0tp.
While empathy was in the top 10. Looking at the data and individual elements it really depends the day and who took the survey to accurately gauge where it would fall. A sample size of 19 just wasn’t statistically significant. One of these days I should rerun it.
Maybe this adds a dimension to your list.
I would personally change visual communication to communication. Product managers need to be proactive at communicating various things to several different stakeholders while putting the information in a format that is useful and understandable to all of them. Hence, need to be able to modulate or tweak the same information content depending on who it is being delivered to and also according to the mode of communication. I’ve seen many misses that have happened due to miscommunication or due to inadequate communication.
Product managers also need to be sure that the message that they are trying to communicate has been sufficiently understood. Without this, often projects and process changes may not have desirable results.
What do you think?
Hi… My name is David. I am a Product Manager for a global French company which manufactures Sugar Milling equipment. My area of responsibility is small – I only look after instrumentation probes.
My job has both technical and commercial skillset requirements. My boss recently completed my appraisal, the first after 5 months in the job; I didn’t perform well; Although the sales is increasing since taking over, and I scored highly on technical aspects, I didn’t on commercial aspects. One critisism is that I did not demonstrate understanding of strategy and didn’t stick to guidelines.
I want to know if anyone else covers both aspects + marketing of product and if they have any advice for me?
I can only advise others that from my lessons in the role: Ask for guidelines and procedure from the outset; fully understand strategy and never ask ever again once you have that information; Send brief, clear, concise reports into the business; this includes relevant sales figures.
On a global scale, my job was to manage distributors and agents around the World. I had to get them into shape to promote our products effectively. I am moving on in 6 weeks, anyone want to give it a try?
Interesting topic — I’m thinking more about this as a set of skills & knowledge instead of traits (semantics?), so a couple other skills/knowledge areas would a solid understanding of the distribution of the product offered and the financial viability of that distribution for the buyers and the sellers of the product.
I think you nailed it! I especially appreciate how you led with empathy. 🙂