Hard Skills for Product Managers
What you'll need to turn an Idea into a real Product
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
There are thousands of people all across the world wanting to break into Product Management — and the great thing about this profession is that there are several ways to land a PM job — be it switching careers powered by a good MBA, moving from a brief Technical, Engineering, Designer, Growth Hacker stint to a Product Management role, Joining an early-stage startup and learning to PM on the fly or simply building a side project/side hustle and learning the art of shipping products.
Getting into Product Management is easy, but succeeding as a PM ? Not so much. Many new Product Managers often join the profession attracted to the glamour of building and shipping products that millions of people will use. But that initial attraction dies down pretty quickly when the real expectations of the PM come to the forefront. The math is simple — to succeed as a Product Manager, you need to create value, not just powerpoints.
A Product Manager will need a wide array of skills to successfully ship a product out the door and to make sure the product you shipped actually makes money. Given the diversity of PM roles out there, the skills required to succeed are not immediately obvious until you’ve spent some time building and shipping products.
The obvious “Soft” Skills
Right out the bat, there are soft skills that a PM needs to be great at, and much has been written about them. These are skills like Storytelling, Painting a vision, Leading by Influence, Cross-functional Team Leadership, and Exceptional Communication skills.
I agree. These are all skills that you will absolutely need to become a great Product Manager, but I’ll tell you what. Overdependence on just soft skills will not get you far. To really make an impact on the products as well as the product team you will need to showcase some real hard skills. You will need to show that you can execute — and walk all the talk and stories.
The observations above are directly based upon my experiences building and shipping products (Hardware, Apps, Saas) over the past several years. I’ve made these observations both as a Product Manager learning the craft, as well as mentoring and managing Product Managers and Product Owners.
Here are some insights to help you think through the core PM skills you will need along the way as you bring a product to market, and also some pointers on how to get started in developing these skills.
The “Hard” Skills in bringing a Product to Market
We all like context. And so it's best to talk about PM skills in context of what a PM must do across the many phases of bringing an idea to market. These are competencies that, once developed, will set you apart from the pack and transform you into a visionary that knows not just the what to build, but also how to make it happen.
To not make this post super lengthy, I’ll split this up into two parts.
For Part -1 this week, I will talk about PM skills necessary to navigate the first two phases of the “Idea to launch” journey — Product Discovery & Product-Market Fit phases. And then next week I’ll wrap it up with a discussion on the remaining three phases.
OK, So Here goes
#1. The Product Discovery Phase
In this phase, the Product Manager is trying to answer the following key questions
Is there a burning problem that lots of people care about?
Can we build something that will solve the problem meaningfully?
Measure and Validate your assumptions and hypotheses.
Create a business case/pitch deck to ask for funding, in case you think the idea is worth pursuing
At this stage, your product may just be an idea or at best a quick and dirty prototype. The PM’s core job here is to prove that there is enough evidence to take the product idea forward. The PM will do lots of customer interviews, smart but quick experimentation, A/B testing, etc. to make sure that precious resources of the organization are worth spending on developing this idea.
Skills you’ll need
Creating Simple and Effective Landing Pages to get early users
Setting up Google/FB Ads — to test your hypothesis at some scale
Understanding user Analytics (I personally like Heap, but you can start with Google Analytics)
Creating a Business Case/model, Financial/ Cost-Benefit Analysis
Working with Simple prototyping and wireframing tools — to paint the vision
Bonus: Learn how to use No Code Tools — follow Ben Tossell and join his community.
#2. Product- Market Fit
At this point, the idea has been validated and you’ve perhaps built a simple prototype with some early users testing your product. If you’ve got the development resources, perhaps you’ve come up with a Minimum Viable Product that hopefully provides the value that your idea promised. The key questions you are answering are
Do early customers/ adopters use it? How often?
Who are the people that are consistently using it? Is there demand at scale?
Will people pay?
Can we find the people that do use the solution and will pay — repeatably, and reliably?
Finding Product-Market Fit (PMF) is the holy grail of product success. But this is also where even the most promising ideas will bite the dust. To really understand if you have PMF, You will have to get clever and innovative with your experiments.
Most likely, As Product Manager you will find that not all users use the product the same way. You’ll need to segment users and find the superfans quickly. You will also have to learn from the ones that dont like your product to understand why not.
You’ll need to ask your early adopters whether or not they will recommend your product to a friend, and finally, you’ll have to test if your users will put their money where their mouths are. In other words, whether or not they’ll pay in exchange for your product.
Skills you’ll need
Measuring things that matter — Identifying and measuring the right KPIs are key here — false positives at the Product Market Fit stage can be very expensive.
AB Testing techniques — here’s another nice guide on the right way to think about A/B tests
Clever Experimentation about what people really think about your product
As you can see, there is never a dull moment when the Product Manager is validating a product idea and determining whether the idea can infact turn into a business. A lot of hard work goes into filtering out things that will not create value — and only further concepts with great business potential to the builder/ engineering teams.
The Build Phase & Beyond
As the validated product concept moves into the Build Phase through to subsequent phases, Product Management’s focus shifts from idea validation to building and launching a real product.
At this point, other functions such as Engineering, Marketing, Sales begin to play a much larger role — however the Product Manager needs to make sure activities in these stages are not dilutive to the overall Product vision. They must understand, contribute to, and coordinate the Engineering, Sales and Marketing efforts such that it all lines up properly for the countdown to launch. And by the way, once you launch, you are really just getting started.
To do all this, the PM needs to masterfully navigate such high pressure, Cross-Functional environments—and you can only do so if you have a set of very specific hard skills. I’ll follow up about what those skills are in part -2 of this series.
Take care & Thanks for reading!
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities.
Interesting read. Nice way of capturing the process. I like this tag line - to succeed as a Product Manager, you need to create value, not just powerpoints