5 Untold Product Management Skills
Product Management is one of the most sophisticated jobs of our time. It has no school where you can learn it entirely and there are plenty of product expert articles about the common tasks like analyzing, setting the KPI’s or agile development. You probably had that “but this article doesn’t apply to my me or my company…” moment, right?
Product management varies by organizations and the product itself. Also the seniority of the team, even the market can change the focus and the tasks of the job. That’s why we product managers have so many different opinions about products and teams.
I’ve been asked very often “What are you looking for at hiring product managers?” The answer is dependable of the team and product but there are some common skills which are untold and what I think are common skills of good product managers. Let me start:
1. Leading through context
Product managers have a lot of power on paper but that won’t work naturally. They whisper in your ears that you are a leader but you are not allowed to operate as they say. They don’t trust you and without trust, you can’t lead. You have to improvise and start to lead through context. Strengthen your arguments, back them up with data, find your ambassador stakeholders. There is always a block in people or management, and they want you to convince them. Even in teammates… If you hear that data-driven company phrase too often, then you should know that doesn’t mean that they are data-driven, it means that they want to be data-driven. Data doesn’t always win, I have also seen companies where ego beats data.
2. Mentoring
The usual teamwork articles are based on competent teams. What happens if some of the members of the team is lacking at competency? Product experts have digested hundreds of products. They know their stories, their marketing strategies, the things which went right or wrong, their communications and their audiences. That can enable them to decide better and faster on some strategy, features or designs, which normally requires researches in each field. The product managers have to share their knowledge and experience with their team where they are confident so the company can move faster. Product managers can fill gaps but also mentor the lacking team members. That culture is usually an underestimated enabler for companies and teams.
3. Anthropology and product graveyard visits
I’m quoting a part of Bruce Sterling’s book called Shaping Things:
People are too ductile to have their problems solved. People are time bound entities transiting from cradle to grave. Any “solved problem” that involves human beings solves a problem whose parameters must change through time. A “thing” is no more stable than the humans who cherish it. Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship.
Products are been developed together with users. Their demand and market patterns are essential. Design the future but understand the past, review the evolution of successful apps. Review the dead apps and understand why they are dead.
4. Copywriting
Everybody is talking about wireframing and prototyping but that can’t work without knowing the essence of copywriting. The grey rectangles you are drawing doesn’t mean anything without placing the correct labels on it. You use placeholder texts or just draft texts and then expect users to understand that on your user testing phase.
5. Anti Engineering
A company can’t stay alive long if their product managers always listen to their users and build what the user wants. You have to build the features to keep them using your product or a leverage to generate more revenue. Let me try to explain with an example I did in the past.
I was the product manager of a parking reservation app for the European market. There was a pattern where our users were coming a bit earlier than they have actually reserved and paid for. If the parking spot was empty, they could adjust the arriving time in 15 min blocks and still use it. The average parking duration per user was 1.52 hours. I took the decision and removed that time adjustment for early birds. Some of them noticed that and called our support, our support helped them immediately and extended their duration. But people started to book a longer period. They started to count the possibility that they arrive early during reserving. So our parking duration per user increased to 1.77h after just 1 month. Our main revenue channel was just that parking durations. So by killing one demanding feature, we could increase the revenues by ~15% and nobody asked for that ditched feature after 1 month anymore.
