Questions I wish people asked me about being a Product Manager
The less sexy, yet frequently more rewarding parts of the role and career
What are the most overrated skills for product managers?
Anything project-management related. I said it. Forgive me Scrum Certification, PMPs, and the world of business analysts and Gantt chart makers.
Seriously though, I wish we spoke about this more openly in the product world. You can’t be a great early-career PM without solid project management skills but it is both the easiest skillset to learn in the PM toolkit and the one that most folks spend far too much time honing when instead they should be tripling down on discovery, design thinking, user research, and all the things needed to work cross-functionally to solve really hard problems in creative ways.
Skip the scrum/PM cert and focus on building your skills and knowledge in service design, user research, analytics, or any number of skills that distinguish the satisfactory from the great.
What are the most underrated skills for product managers?
I’m going to cover three that are pretty different: Service Design, “Drawing,” and facilitation.
Why Service Design? This isn’t a “skill” per se, but an entire field adjacent to UX that is designed to help people create incredible experiences that solve problems. What is distinctive about Service Design is that it recognizes that no solution — and tech solutions in particular — exists in a bubble. Starting from a deep understanding of how different pain points surface for users along a journey, Service Designs then attempts to address one or more inflection points that recognize the underlying emotions, stressors, and situations that need to be solved for. Go beyond an understanding of user research and really dig into this.
By “drawing” I really mean visual communication. As a PM, some combination of Miro and Powerpoint/Slides are probably good friends of yours. But to wield them well you need to do more than present information in a clean format. You have to tell a story. You have to be able to visualize your thinking, whether with basic shapes, colors, and connectors or with actual sketches. This isn’t just the domain of product designers — the more confidence you have with your visual communication skills the easier it will be to communicate your vision, explore ideas, and engage a wide range of stakeholders.
Last, I see PMs all over failing to run effective meetings. This ranges from meetings that just aren’t a good use of time to ones that miss key opportunities to engage and include the perspectives of folks who can help the product improve. You’re going to be in a lot of meetings as PM — get good at running them.
Want more on this? Check out the classic essay by Ken Norton.
What are the common product approaches that you read about that are actually much harder to implement in practice?
Agile? Just kidding. Kinda. But to be more specific, the area that I see product teams and groups really struggle with is a continuous discovery.
I noticed this gap recently when speaking with an Agile coach who said something akin to “most Agile coaches don’t know how to effectively coach PMs on discovery.” Maybe I’m missing the point, but one of the most essential things PMs need coaching on is discovery, and agile is a means for iterative discovery and delivery. When I see the emphasis on incremental execution, I see red flags everywhere.
In the solution space, one of the best frameworks for continuous discovery comes from Teresa Torres. I’m also a fan of dual-track Agile as a forcing function for this for teams that need more structure.
What do you need to know and do to level up from a product manager to product director?
Maybe this is obvious, and it’s a topic I’ll return to later, but there are three distinguishing factors:
- your ability to develop the capacity of others,
- your proven leadership addressing large, complex problems, and
- your ability to engage and get buy-in from a wide array of stakeholders, including c-level execs and GMs.
What do you think about being the CEO of the product?
No, I do not wish people asked me about this and fortunately, they do not. Unfortunately I like others have decided to write about it anyway.
How do you build trust with your team?
Keep your promises. Care about them as humans. Include them in solving problems. Show them you understand the tradeoffs they need to work with and consider. I’ve written specifically about how to build trust with design and data science before. I’ll get to engineering, marketing, and sales soon!
