4 Essential Skills for Product Managers

Have you ever seen job ad for Product Managers? The listed requirements on qualification, skills and past experience would blow your mind. Hiring a product manager is as good as finding a unicorn in forest.

As a product manager, you need to understand a little bit of everything! This list of ‘little bits’ can be endless. You must understand your skills If you are a new product manager or an existing product manager trying to move up in the hierarchy.

• Technical skills — technical skills are fundamental for product managers. For each product life cycle stage, you need to exercise different technical skills. Market analysis skills are required in the discovery phase. Having UX, software development and engineering logic is handy during the product development phase. Data analysis is super critical to analyze the feedback or conduct AB testing during growth stage. Technical skills range from data analysis, API design, HCI and software engineering. Depending on the product you manage, the proficiency of these skills will vary. Also, if you are a dedicated product manager for growth or UX then naturally that specific skill will take up most of your work time. You don’t always need to have formal education to acquire technical skills but that’s the straightforward way in my opinion.
• Domain knowledge — domain knowledge is expertise about a specific function or market or operations etc. This domain knowledge will help you design your product better or understand your users faster. For online tax products, if you understand the tax process, the automation in the process may be better. If you have teaching experience, you may connect with users for online learning products. There are many successful product managers without formal technical education, leveraging just their domain knowledge. They bring their specific expertise to build great products with the help of a technical team. If you don’t have a technical background but want to get into the product domain, maybe this could be a great start for you.
• Influence — I can’t stress enough how important ‘influencing skills’ are to collaborate with teams who do not report to you but deliver your product. Your product vision, KPIs, roadmap prioritization everything requires alignment from stakeholders and commitment from cross-functional teams (i.e. engineering/UX/marketing team etc). Influencing skill is not one absolute skill, but rather a combination of clear and consistent activities like communication, documentation, logical reasoning and use of data to keep everyone on the same page.
• Time management — All managers work with cross-functional teams,in simple words, you will attend a bunch of meetings! You have to manage your time. After all, you want to live your life too. Simply put, you juggle through many tasks, deliverables and teams in a day. Please block out time to work on your deliverables like roadmaps, PRDs or user research. Keep some weekly time reserved for reading or learning a new skill. Enforce strict meeting ethics. Meet only when it’s a must, have a clear agenda and learn to decline a meeting if you do not have context on the meeting.

Identify what your strengths are and find a job or promotion that aligns with your stronger skills. All skills take time to build. As you sharper your stronger skills, pick one skill each quarter and work on it. You can take up a LinkedIn learning course, certificate or youtube content to learn about it. See if you enjoy that skill. Supplement your new skills with side projects or pet projects. Ultimately, your career is a sum total of all the skills you acquire over the course of time.