Product Management Skills

What are the ten critical skills of Product Managers?

To become a super product manager, you must qualify for the position. Qualification means owning the skills we are about to describe in this article. But before that, let’s, first of all, evaluate the types of skills a product manager should have. 

The skills include soft and hard skills. All of these top skills play a crucial role in service delivery for product managers. That is why best-performing product managers will have both soft and hard skills. 

Soft skills define the personality of a person and how a person fits a given role. Therefore, such skills include interpersonal, prioritization, and leadership skills. While they seem basic, these skills help product managers execute their functions with ease.             

On the other hand, hard skills, better known as technical skills, are the skills a product manager gets after learning through the appropriate course. These skills are crucial as they help product managers execute technical functionalities, and they include using product management technology, writing technical aspects of products, and creating product/roadmap strategies. 

Therefore, from the above description, every product manager should have soft skills for leading the team to get the best product results through product management training. Technical skills, on the other hand, are effective for developing and designing the best products. 

Now, let’s describe the skills in detail below:

Technical Skills of a product manager

As you climb your ladder toward becoming the best product manager, ensure you master the following technical skills:

Understand the Web Development concept

Although product managers will always have a team specialized in programming and coding, it is crucial they understand the processes to ensure they understand the measures programmers and developers are using to bring out the best product. 

This is to ensure quality results always and speak the same language with the related teams during the product development phases. 

Know how to write technical specs and requirements

Creating a new and desirable product means creating new ideas, then optimizing the ideas. Therefore, as a product manager, you must have these technical skills to ensure the whole product development process takes place effectively without getting stuck along the process. 

Besides, if, as a product manager, you can give detailed requirements, create technical specs of the product, and suggest product features, it makes it easy to work with other designers and engineers as a team. 

Doing extensive market research

A good product manager must know how to do good research for a high-quality product. Creating a new product requires detailed research to get ideas and concepts for improving the overall results. 

Such research is crucial in determining the possible audience and how the product can penetrate the market to meet the needs or fill the gap. 

Have user experience best practices knowledge

The whole process of product development will always have UI and UX experts. While these experts do more of the tasks, it is crucial for a product manager to have adequate knowledge of the same to implement some decisions. 

Besides, understanding user experience best practices means the manager can collaborate well with other teams to bring out a desirable product while saving time and resources in hiring other experts for consultation purposes.

What’s more, a product manager who understands the whole concept of user experience can easily highlight the exact requirements to ensure to final product matches the exact requirements and specifications.

Soft Skills of a Product Manager

The following are the basic soft skills a product manager should have;

Critical thinking & Analytical skills 

As a product manager, you will always get information and data to provide to your teams. This means you must be able to evaluate and understand the data before presenting it to the teams for the next actions. 

Therefore, this calls for analytical and critical thinking skills to ensure value to the customer and the business as a whole. 

Above all, product managers make decisions every moment whenever the need arises. If a product manager cannot evaluate the options well, it will be hard to make sound and productive decisions. 

Leadership skills

Like any business setup or organization, the overall manager must have leadership skills. These skills help in team building and motivating the juniors and other employees to always be productive and to keep improving. 

In product development, leadership skills are crucial, especially when working with different teams to meet deadlines. Therefore, before the product gets launched, it means there is a pro manager with great leadership skills behind the successful journey.

One more element, product development requires different stages and different teams (development, product, engineering, marketing, and sales teams) that must collaborate. In such a case, the product manager brings the teams together for the effectiveness of the final product through leadership skills. 

Flexibility

In the product development field, priorities can change at any given time. There can come up more instructions and new requirements. Therefore, a product manager must be ready to adapt to all these changes at any moment when product development is in progress.

Apart from responding well to abrupt changes immediately, the same product managers must identify matters to prioritize first and implement them as needed. 

Problem-Solving

The purpose of product development is to solve an existing problem. The problem can be customers or the business itself. Therefore, product managers should equip themselves with problem-solving skills in advance before they become professionals. 

Besides, there can arise issues among the teams that need immediate attention. Therefore, product managers should put in place measures to resolve the problem and find a suitable solution to create an accommodating environment for everyone. 

Time Management

Many product development projects will always have deadlines that are tight. Therefore, product managers need to learn time management skills as they practice how to prioritize urgent projects while keeping time to meet all the deadlines. 

Apart from product development projects, the same product managers ought to meet other tasks and responsibilities, and this calls for proper time management. 

Communication Skills

Spoken and written communication are significant elements in product development. While product managers are on the top, they need to communicate effectively with other teams to understand the project’s requirements. 

Besides, product managers should bring the teams together to enhance teamwork, which promotes productivity. All these elements require a person who can communicate boldly and clearly. 

Conclusion

The product development field is a wide field that calls for professional managers. Are you looking forward to uplifting your product development business to extreme heights? Well, the process starts with getting the best product manager with the skills described in this write-up. 

About Radical Product Thinking

In the last decade, we’ve learned that the key to innovation and building successful products is to iterate quickly. Unfortunately, for every product that found success by over relying on iteration, there’s a vast graveyard of failures that you never hear about. Trying many things and pivoting often is one of the main reasons startups run out of money. But even if your company has a war chest of funding, frequent pivots leave employees feeling confused, directionless, and demoralized – it’s bad for growth. Iterations and pivots are like silver bullets. How can you use them sparingly and deliberately?

This is where Radical Product Thinking comes in. Radical Product Thinking is a methodology for building successful products systematically. It helps you rethink your product and translate your desire for change into reality through the five elements of the methodology (vision, strategy, prioritization, execution and measurement, and culture). Be prepared to toss out everything you know about a good vision and learn how to measure progress to create revolutionary products. The best part? You don’t have to be a natural-born visionary to produce extraordinary results.

The RPT methodology has been adopted by organizations around the world, including startups, multinationals, nonprofits, and government agencies. To learn more about how you can systematically build world-changing products, you can get the Radical Product Thinking book, and you can also download the free toolkit.