The softer aspect of product management skills
Identifying the skills required for meaningful career growth
Product management, being a multifaceted profession, requires an extensive set of hard and soft skills. While both are useful in their own way, in my view there is a clear distinction: While the hard skills in product management enable the day to day work to be done, it is the soft skills that enable product managers to have a deep and lasting impact on the business.
Skills in product management
Let’s start by briefly examining how skills are categorized.
Hard skills are teachable abilities that are directly related to specific job competencies and can be clearly defined and measured. In contrast, soft skills are more abstract and are also known as interpersonal or people skills.
The list of hard skills required in product management includes requirements gathering, prioritization ability, business and technical acumen, research and analysis proficiency, a basic design taste and so on. It is worth mentioning that the required set of hard skills can vary from role to role, as product management is a practice that differs greatly in how it is practiced. For example, in larger companies there may be different product roles that focus on specific skill sets (the pricing product manager or the technical product manager), whereas in smaller companies product managers have a greater breadth of responsibility.
On the other hand, soft skills are by nature more difficult to quantify. They partly stem from a person’s demeanor and they can also be learned. As all skills they get better by practicing and actively trying to use them in personal or work life.
Product managers typically start by learning the hard skills and they increasingly depend on soft skills to get things done as they progress in their careers.
Let’s go over the most important soft skills for product managers.
Empathy
The best product managers have the ability and desire to get into the shoes of others and see things from their perspective. Empathy is essentially approaching people relations on the principle that it is about them and not us.
Successful products solve important problems. Product managers need to be able to connect with their users so that they can identify what the important problems are along with all their nuances and hidden details. They need to make a habit of actively listening and probing deeper to uncover the root causes behind what appears on the surface.
They need to care for the pain that their customers experience.
There is an important detail however. Chris Voss in his great book “Never split the difference” defines empathy as: “the ability to understand the perspective of a counterpart and the vocalization of that recognition”. Notice that his definition does not dictate to agree or commit to anything – that’s sympathy.
Trying to be empathetic should not be confused with trying to provide solutions for all people’s problems. Being empathetic as a product manager means making an effort to understand what the important problems of users are and why they are happening, so that they can be solved in a way that aligns with the company’s mission and vision.
Effective communication
Closely related to empathy is the ability to communicate effectively. Simply put, great product managers are also excellent communicators.
Building products is a team sport. An interesting metaphor for product management is that it is the glue that binds several departments together in order to solve problems and launch products. A product manager’s ability to communicate is closely related with how effectively they can do this.
Building products is also messy. It is common in organizations for effort to be wasted due to miscommunication when building products. There are usually many people involved, across various departments, each one with their own set of goals and objectives. What makes sense for one may not make sense for the other. And what one assumes as a given may be an edge case for the other. Closing the communication gap in product development falls squarely on the shoulders of product managers.
Moreover, it is very important for product people to take written positions on important matters. Writing things down has the added benefit of being able to take the time to think thoroughly about matters. Not only that but information in written form can be easily followed up and spread around. In contrast, action items assigned verbally in meetings are almost never followed through and corridor agreements have the tendency to be forgotten.
Dear fellow product managers, do not be afraid to over-communicate. No harm can come out of it. As George Bernard Shaw once said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”.
Self control
Consider the following quote on what a leader is (the addition in the brackets is mine):
“A leader [but also a great product manager] is someone who can project calm in the face of chaos”.
I think that this is very relevant to this discussion, as product management is a leadership function. Let me explain: While most product managers do not have any direct authority over people, they need to be able to rally people in their organizations so that they can make things happen.
Businesses can get frenetic sometimes. New products, new launches, fast changing priorities. Product managers need to be able to have self control and more specifically be able to keep calm in stressful situations, be positive and project dependability. They need to be the voice of reason in their domain.
Consistently controlling themselves to exhibit these behaviors, will greatly help product managers to control the environment around them in difficult situations, allowing them to elicit positive outcomes out of what would otherwise appear as ordinary mess.
Grit
Product management is hard. If one comes to the profession expecting an easy ride and instant gratification then I would suggest they look somewhere else.
There will be days when things will be chaotic. When your communication will fall on deaf ears and common sense will be an elusive notion. This is usually normal. (As long as it does not happen all the time).
Product managers need to be resilient and be in for the long game, as product success comes from the small day to day wins that accumulate over time. That is not to say that the big wins are not important – they are – but it is the steady pace of the small successes that sets the stage for the big splashes. Product managers should lead their teams through this process, enduring the hard times and continuously push forward knowing that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
And that takes grit. Grit is defined as: “a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or end state” (Wikipedia).
In simpler words, grit is the ability to endure the hardships of day to day while remaining focused on the long term vision. That is exactly what successful product management requires.
Final words
Hard skills enable product managers to effectively manage their products – gather requirements, prioritize requests, do market research and so on. However, it is the soft skills that enable product managers to grow beyond the roles of backlog manager or product expert and have a deep impact on the business.
While there are numerous relevant soft skills to product management, the most important are the ability to empathize, the aptitude for effective communication and the ability to always remain calm and positive in difficult times. Add to these the grit to relentlessly pursue long term goals and you have the foundations for being a great product manager.