A Collection Of Skills, Knowledge & Behaviours

Product management demands a lot from product people. With a multi-faceted set of activities and areas of work, the craft requires the ability to do multiple things, often in parallel. It’s no surprise that it’s talked about as a 60 hour a week job*.

As I’ve found in various roles and situations (from negotiating timelines with stakeholders, to selecting and agreeing next priorities, setting the approach for a new initiative, digging into data to solve an issue, and coaching team members, amongst others) different skills, knowledge and behaviours are required to get product done.

In this article, I want to delve into some of the content from my book ‘Product Management: Mastering the Product Role’ to highlight a few that I’ve learned, used and observed in my quests to be effective. Let’s start with storytelling…

Be a storyteller. Much of the success of your product will ride on you and your teams’ ability to communicate what you are trying to achieve. So, always have your product story front of mind and be able to communicate it inside and outside your team. It’s worth thinking in terms of short, medium and long versions — what would you tell someone if you had 15 seconds, what if you had more time to get into more details and what if you have as much time as required to break it down into the minutiae details?

Share information and insight. Be the router for your product information and share everything that is relevant with the right people. In a collaborative environment ‘knowledge sharing’ is a powerful way to make amazing things happen.

“One of my most favourite conversations is with tech architects…”

Love the expertise. Product management is about pulling a team of experts together and the more experts the better the outcome. Domain experts exist across the organisation so use their valuable input to help drive your product forward. One of my most favourite conversations is with tech architects who have regularly used their expertise to create workable solutions to complex and hard challenges.

Be a product leader. Lead on creating and delivering a product vision, objectives/goals and strategy that meets customer needs, fits the organisation’s context and focuses on returning value to the business. Lead on being the product expert. Lead on being the glue that brings together multiple parts of the organisation. Lead on developing the ‘we’ over ‘I’. Lead by being positively influential, and using your influence to create win-win situations for you and your stakeholders. Lead by standing up and being ‘accountable’.

Be commercial. Meeting customer needs is crucial. Doing it at a loss will only last for so long. Even if you start with a free or low cost product, ensure you have a plan for monetisation that equates to profit: cash in the bank after you’ve received your revenue and paid the cost of sale. Of course, that is unless you are charged with managing a loss leader that drives engagement while other products drive profit — although even here there should be some semblance of the commercial value the product delivers.

“…analyse what’s happened, learn from it and move on.”

Prepare to mess up (and learn). Not everything you do will go to plan. When it doesn’t you can sit there consoling yourself about this imperfect world or you can analyse what’s happened, learn from it and move on.

Celebrate success. You set out to achieve an outcome, so when it’s achieved celebrate that success. Celebrating success doesn’t need to mean throwing a big party, it could be much more fun and interesting. Just think if your whole team (or at least those who were interested) did a dance around the office every time you achieve an additional 10,000 or 1m customers. Sounds like fun, right? Gets the blood and endorphins pumping? Not only this, but people will want to join the team just so they can join the dancing.

Be self-aware (especially what you’re not good at). Many of us would like to be gold medallists at everything. But we’re not and won’t be. Recognise what you are good at and find people or create teams with a balance that helps get all the things we need done.

Follow the process and ignore the process. Everything is a process that takes one or more steps to complete — some process should be static and some should be dynamic in nature. Hygiene activities such as backlog prioritisation, delivery flow, reporting, user testing, retrospectives and planning can follow a more ridge process that is incrementally improved. While more creative work should follow processes that you define in context. All processes should be up for continuous review, especially if you identify issues and/or find new and better ways of working.

“…promote a culture that is customer focused, open, transparent, inclusive, collaborative.”

Contribute to the culture. Today it is fair to say that the discipline of product management is one of the positive forces driving changes to how organisations operate. Product people must continue this and further promote a culture that is customer focused, open, transparent, inclusive, collaborative etc.

As well as trying to be proactive in assessing and thinking about the context and how I apply different skills, knowledge and behaviours, I find that combing this with reflection helps me to continuously learn, adjust and increase my effectiveness. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of my best learnings have been reflective.

In the book Product Management: Mastering the Product Role, all of the above and multiple other areas (headlined in the word cloud at the top) are covered. Let me know what you see as important requirements to be effective in product management in the comments below, via Twitter or LinkedIn.

That’s it for now. Look out for more posts on product related topics.

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Asomi Ithia is a Product Guy, author of the Product Management Series of Books and Co-organiser of Product Group London

Let’s work together.