A product manager’s job description has a number of bullet points, but there are many more things they do on a daily basis that are unwritten.
Recently my non profit professional organization hosted a panel discussion on Product Management (PM). We had invited stellar product leaders to talk about the discipline of product management. The audience largely consisted of engineers who wanted to be PMs.
At that time I was not sure the motivation for them to become product managers (maybe the grass is greener on the other side). But it dawned on me that there are no defined career paths for becoming a PM. There are no university level credits. In fact, you just land on become a PM. More recently, some org have started to offer PM level certifications to help wanna be PM to land jobs. I expect that becoming a PM will be more defined in coming years. Google and Facebook already have programs to nurture product managers.
There are many types of PM roles such as outbound, inbound, technical PM, product owners etc. I will not discuss these here. But for any PM role, there are certain traits that are expected. Many of these are personality oriented, others are learnt through experience.
A product manager does a lot of different things to get their product out in the market.
If you are considering transitioning to product management, consider these skills.
Here are some samples of things they do that may not be listed in a typical job description. This is not an exhaustive list.
Ability to Collaborate Cross Functionally
Product managers are often seen running around meetings to meetings. To get to product launch, they have to juggle several tasks and collaborate with almost every organization in the company. During my last product launch I touched almost every department –
- Product Marketing for the goto market planning and launch activities
- Sales for training the sales reps
- Channels for partner provisioning and communication
- Support for documentation and training
- Legal to update the contract language
- Internal applications to add a new SKU in the order form.
All of the above are in addition to the daily work collaborating with engineering, UX, architects, release management and operations to get the product out the door. An important lesson is that getting the product out of the door is not enough, you have to get it into the hands of the users. A subtle but huge difference. Even after launch, you have to keep working with sales, account managers and support to ensure that the product is being used.
If something is blocking a launch or product usage, then it is the product manager’s job to get it unblocked. Simply saying “this is not my job” or “they were supposed to do it” is not going to cut it.
Persuasion and Influence
One of the hardest part of a product manager role is to persuade everyone to your way of thinking. Even if people don’t report to you, you still have to influence them. That’s what makes it tough. Product manager is the focal point for assimilating inputs from various sources, based on which they are able to make informed decisions about the product. Now they have to report back and influence stakeholders to get along – to engineers, architects, UX, marketing or even your company executives.
Effective Communications
Whatever goes in the product manager’s head has to be communicated out to the right audience. Having excellent communication skills is not just the ability to confidently present. It’s about explaining your thought process to various audiences. Choosing the right tone and the right granularity is important to get your message across effectively. This comes with practice.
Decisions
Product managers have to make many decisions. Some decisions are very hard to do.
Which of these two features to prioritize? Which of these two bugs to fix? Should I defer the bug that is impacting a large customer?
There are many different frameworks for decision making and they vary by company, by product, by situation. Pick one that suits your situation. Once you have arrived at a decision, you need to hold on to it and be able to justify rationally, preferably with numbers to back them.
Subject Authority
A good product manager is the subject authority on a number of topics. They need to know their own product area at the back of their hand. They also need to be the expert on the industry, the competition and most important their own customers. They also need to be aware of the peripheral areas such as architecture, legal, commercial, marketing etc.
Once we were planning a major feature in a product which violated a specific article in GDPR. Our customers MSA did not have a provision that would have helped us circumvent that. So I had to have the subject matter knowledge not just on the product but also our own MSA and the law.
Rapid Context Switching
On an average day, a product manager could be doing all of these just by lunch time.
- Attend scrum
- Problem solve a specific ticket with an engineer
- Provide a roadmap presentation to a customer
- Brainstorm the value proposition messaging with product marketing
- Talk to exec staff about an upcoming product strategy session
- Respond to Slack message from your engineering lead who needs you to clarify a specific ticket ASAP
- Continue working on your roadmap presentation due tomorrow
A good product manager can rapidly switch contexts and still be able to maintain their true north. By the way, nothing wrong in having a job with multiple facets. It is by design.
And there are many more such traits a PM need to have. If you are the type of worker who enjoys the unstructured nature of this role as described above, then by all means consider a PM role. Otherwise, there are many other roles that are structured and well suited to your style.