How is an excellent product manager defined? There are different opinions and there is no clear standard, but we find common things in these excellent product managers. We boil down to the “seven swords” of the product manager.
Hello everyone, I asked Liu Yitong to translate this article, then processed it and added a few sentences about my understanding of the role of product manager, and sent it to everyone to share. The seven abilities mentioned here refer to the abilities that you need to become an excellent product manager after you become a qualified product manager.
Before you read this article, ask yourself, have you met the standard of “qualified product manager”?
1. A successful product manager with communication skills must be an excellent communicator.
From the analysis of the excellent product managers I know, the most common characteristic they have is “excellent oral and written communication skills at work”.
Why is communication important? In many companies, the most decisive role of the product manager plays the role of the communication hub, as shown in the figure below.
The ability to effectively communicate between different roles, in detail, is the ability to communicate with different personality types, that is, speaking different “language” when communicating in different roles. For effective communication, it is important that you use the “language” of your target audience.
For example, most engineers tend to be “introverted”, while most sales/marketing professionals tend to be “extroverted.” This means that compared to communicating with engineers, you need to use “another language” when communicating with marketing specialists. Similarly, when you communicate with your supervisor, you must focus more on the higher-level “forest level” than the “tree level”. However, many product managers still erroneously talk to the supervisors. Talking about how beautiful this tree is.
2. Leaders without power. Successful product managers have the ability to become excellent leaders without formal power.
In most companies, product managers are expected to play a “leadership role” in multiple areas. This includes leading project teams, leading product planning and roadmaps, leading cross-departmental communication, etc.
However, in most of these cases, the product manager does not have the power to coordinate these departments.
How to lead others without power? I would say, using joint influence, negotiation, networking and other similar techniques.
Is it possible to lead without power? My thoughts on this are well summarized by this question. My answer is a rhetorical question: How much power do Gandhi and Martin Luther King have?
3. Learning skills. In my words, Peng Yi means that good product managers are good at doing things they are not good at.
Good product managers must have the ability to learn quickly, the market changes rapidly, and new technologies are always emerging. “Differentiated products” are produced in less than 6 months today, and sometimes even faster.
I think one of the mistakes most companies make when hiring product managers is that they value “strong expertise.”
For example, a company that does software security is looking for a product manager with more than 5 years of experience in software security. I think this is a wrong approach.
A better way is to find a product manager with experience in software engineering and the ability to learn quickly. This method has been implemented very well for me. Before I was hired, the best product managers did not have the professional knowledge of the work they are currently engaged in.
4. Business acumen. Successful product managers also have a good understanding of basic business principles.
They understand how to identify market opportunities, the importance of competitive differentiation, strategies for creating successful products, pricing, promotion, collaboration, analysis, declarations, and more.
This does not mean they need a master’s degree in business administration. In fact, most of the successful product managers I have met do not have an MBA, but they have a good understanding of the basic principles of business.
5. Product managers who love the product success have an inherent love for the product.
They are happy to keep up with the new products on the market, as much as they get. They register a large number of “betas” sites, download the latest version of the software and use it, and so on.
They are happy with the designed products, even if they are not made by their company. They hate poorly designed products, even if they are made by their own company.
They love to create great products, whether it is a brand new product or an improvement on an existing product.
6. Pay attention to details. Any business is composed of details. Attention to details is the necessary foundation for creating great products.
Steve Jobs once said:
The iMac is more than just color or translucent or the shape of the case. The essence of iMac is to make every element come together to become the best consumer computer. With our latest iMac, I firmly believe that we get rid of the fan, because it is more enjoyable to work with a computer that does not buzz all the time.
Throwing away the fan is not only as simple as a stubborn decision by Steve, he needs a huge project behind him to figure out how to better handle the power consumption and how to better dissipate heat through the machine. This is the core point of our products. Customers buy us for us to solve all these details, so they are easy and like to use our computers.
Successful product managers pay attention to details not only in terms of product performance, but also in competitiveness analysis, project planning, and almost every activity they are mainly responsible for.
My words: Again, this kind of detail is reflected in your reports, plans, and mission planning books. In the content, please describe the implementation details as much as possible; in the performance, please reflect the UI design details of a product designer as much as possible. If a product manager can’t even read the report happily, how can he expect the product to have an excellent user experience?
7. Conventional product management skills A product manager needs these skills to complete daily tasks. They include writing market analysis reports and demand analysis reports, performing competitive product analysis, creating product routes, stating product performance and benefits, defining user interfaces, and so on.
Every company needs such skills. This skill is placed last because I think it is easy for a product manager with the above six points to learn these skills.
