A Product manager is like a CEO, of a small company - it could be a feature, product, vertical. You are responsible for the success of that feature, end-to-end.
When I got into the PM role, I was able to leverage my consulting experience, first principles thinking and had the benefit of excelling in recent years of my career. I also had some PM-necessary skills which my interviewers quickly saw through.
After joining, I networked with a lot of PMs, sifted through CVs, took some PM interviews & went through lot of PM JDs to get a hang of what is needed for this simple-looking but complex job.
In one of my exploration activities I picked up 60+ JDs for Product Managers, including from top companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and so on, and did a word-cloud on them, to find what do all companies look at in a PM?
This is what I found
The key responsibilities of a PM role, as you can gather from the word-cloud above are:
- Driving product strategy
- Understanding customer requirements
- Knowing the market
- Prioritising right features
- Driving product execution
- Understanding team capabilities
- Helping team execute
- Knowing when to escalate, when to push back
- Support the team as needed
To be able to perform the above, the skill set needed is:
- Great communication - Your daily communication - written & verbal - should be clear, understandable yet detailed enough for team to know all that's needed. You will be writing product briefs, working guides, feature details, etc for all things you lead.
- Structured thinking - PM role is as ambiguous as it gets. You will face unexpected new problems and will have to find a structure out of it to make it more understandable and to find a solution for it. You not only need to understand it yourself, but also have to make your team understand the problem & scope of potential solution! This is a tough skill hence people with experience are needed many times for PM role.
- First principles thinking - This is basic problem solving skill, as the problems are unexpected and unknown many times solution comes from very basic thinking. This is known as first principles thinking. You can think of it as, if you didn't know anything about a domain how would you solve problems using basic logic & analytics.
- Thinking out of the box - As you lead a product your aim is to give maximum value to customers while differentiating your product enough. So the solutions have to be creative. You would need to think of the best possible version of your product to start with.
- Creating a working solution - And then you'll have to take the best version and cut down "good-to-have" features to create a feature list which can be implementable in the desired timeframe. This is one of the key jobs of a PM role. You need to brutally prioritise ALL THE TIME.
- Execution mindset - To get products built, you need to know how to execute. You should be able to run sprints, scrums, help team navigate roadblocks, find alternate solutions at the last moment, be aggressive on meeting deadlines but know enough about the scope & timelines to push back if needed. You need to make the feel comfortable so that they're not stressed by the work but still get work done based on timeline. It requires creating tons of lists, tasks, tracking and instilling a sense of ownership in the team.
- Basic product sense, domain knowledge - The more you know about what you are working on, the better solutions you can give. You can be more involved in feature level implementation discussions, give new and helpful ideas to the team. This might mean having technical knowledge for a tech based product. There's always more to learn and you always need to read up for improving this!
- Being market aware - Building a product means knowing what value you want to provide to your customers - today & tomorrow. For that you need to know what is going on with customers, what are your competitors doing & how is the industry moving in general - this is essential to create future product roadmaps & knowing what to prioritise
- Exhibiting leadership qualities - PM is not a direct managerial role, you work with team members from different departments, and have to make them work together towards a common goal. It is tough, as you've to ensure all team members goals & priorities align with your product goals! You've to be a great leader with ability to influence and drive product decisions for the same. This skill is tough to have as a fresher - hence many roles have a minimum experience requirement!
In the next blog I will talk about how do you exhibit these skills in your resume & your interview! Stay tuned :)