Product Manager Skill Set

Product Manager Skill Set – Mindful of professional bias, this version of the T-shaped product management skill set was brought together using fresh information from recent PM sections by key contributors.

The T-shaped expert is a framework for looking at a set of knowledge areas with tools that are very useful when solving problems in a particular area of ​​expertise.

Product Manager Skill Set

In the presentation, the vertical position of T is a narrow set of knowledge and skills that are important for solving production management problems. The horizontal section is the vast range of topics on which a PM professional can contribute and gain knowledge.

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I will soon describe all the works deemed important, explain why they are listed here, and add links to more content and detailed information about them for you to read for yourself.

Core skills are (literally) the bread and butter of a product manager, the tools that distinguish PMs from other professionals.

The Product Manager in a company is like a small CEO/Founder, because he makes the top decisions and shapes the product strategy. One of the key aspects of strategy is defining the vision and mission. It’s about asking yourself “What do I want to gain from this product?”.

What will your product look like 20 years from now? For Henry Ford, “Everybody should buy a car”. For Spotify, their vision is “Spotify becomes the Music OS”.

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Your product needs a reason to exist. Without vision and work, whatever PM does, any small adjustment, any development is useless, because there is no purpose. For a small PM, it’s a small goal, for a product or a product. For a Product Manager, this can be a company-wide goal.

To learn more about strategy theory, I recommend reading a book called Exploring Strategy (thorough scientific analysis from strategy professors) and strategy cases, such as the book This new about Spotify from Strategyery.

A trading plan is what you need to decide where to go in the market. While the Strategy View must consider why the product exists, the Business Strategy describes what ensures the continued existence of the product, how the product will survive (and/or continue to grow). development).

Having a clear vision is great, but it won’t be of much value to product managers if they don’t know how to turn the vision into reality. And that’s where the business part comes in.

The Product Management Skill Book

A good product must be sustainable, which means it must generate enough profit to continue to grow without external capital input. To that end, a product manager must be able to set short- and long-term goals and objectives, and identify ways to meet them using available resources.

Knowing how to create value and monetize it, and doing it consistently towards the product vision means defining the Business Strategy as a PM.

You can get some great business ideas from these product blogs. Also, here is a list of 24 good business resources.

Creating products is creating value, ie creating products that solve human problems. Hypotheses about other people’s problems PMs come with necessary testing because scientific theories require empirical evidence. And to test these ideas requires Customer Development or User Research – a guide to working with people based on sociological (+anthropological) methods used in business: interviews , surveys, questionnaires, etc.

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This point is about the ability to create usage methods (SCRUM and others) and technologies for managing production work. It’s a daily process of deciding the “most important thing you can do right now” for your team. It is also an idea to support your product, to represent it.

Look at books on specific workgroups of product owners, such as this book by O’Reily or this book on value proposition design.

Designing experiences and interfaces that allow seamless interaction with a product is an art and a PM must be at least as good as a UX designer in this piece of art theory to review great products. The product manager must work with the designer to ensure that the product goals are met.

UX is an important part of a user’s interaction with a product, and a product professional without UX skills would not be able to discover and design this (very important) part of the user journey.

Make Better Business Decisions Using Product Manager Kpis

Product marketing creates an optical market for product activity. You target specific markets, in general, using the right methods for these markets – to make your product relatable to the market. Product Marketing tools include many traditional marketing methods (furniture, location/message), but also employ a competitive, user-centric and product-aligned strategy.

Quantitative analysis isn’t a magic tool that solves every production problem, but it can be very helpful (especially when it comes to profitability). Think about the metrics and work on the features that matter to your product’s success. It is about abstraction and theory, and is an important tool for generating understanding. One of the main “selling points” of a product manager is the ability to take a specific metric and increase that metric.

Any specialist can do research, but in production management, research methods are used on another level. User research, market research, research possible product solutions. Most of the time PM has to study and learn, because it is not possible to create value without adequate knowledge of the environment.

These resources can help with a deeper understanding of research: research methods wikibook, methodology website, research page.

Product Management Skills

The process of finding large markets with sufficient customer demand and tracking unmet needs in those markets. Arguably the most important area of ​​knowledge a PM needs to master, as it determines productivity growth. Keeping in mind that companies often need to adjust and rethink their product marketing strategy, product specialists do this a lot.

That’s the scientific method of a product manager. One can make hundreds of assumptions that seem right, but testing them against the facts is what will prove that they can benefit anyone. After testing one hypothesis, the PM goes on to test other hypotheses and continues this in an iterative process.

Ways to effectively guide a product through all life stages is essential to know that PMs do not intend to waste resources and energy. This is a fully functional area studied in business schools, but it has some aspects of production management.

The prioritization of tasks builds on all other productive skills, but the technical part is important in itself.. Prioritizing tasks – deciding what to do what to do first and what to do later – what the product manager does for the team. The ICE/IRICE score is one of the guidelines for prioritization, and there are many useful ways to measure this process.

Why Human Skills Will Set You Apart As A Product Manager

An important modern management style is not something a product manager can avoid. Two rules – discard non-value-added items and try to ship and upgrade in shorter cycles. The key takeaway is not to produce anything until you’re sure it’s needed. Having a good knowledge of lean methods is a must for a manufacturing professional for effective management.

Here’s a podcast on how to balance trust in your team, plus there’s also a 2018 book by Mangalam Nandakumar on trust in product management.

Funnels are often thought of as a marketing tool, but PMs use them as often as marketers. Tailoring specific steps and finding errors in the funnel when metrics are off improves productivity in small increments, bringing more value to your users your way. Some product professionals find more fresh insights using funnel data analytics. Conducting sales training also provides valuable feedback.

A step-by-step technical guide to using Google Analytics can be useful in practice. There is also a course from Udemy

Product Manager Skills Survey

The product manager is the company’s internal entrepreneur. And, like any entrepreneur, he has become familiar with the administrative, economic, financial and legal aspects of the business. This may sound trivial, but not having a reliable background in these areas (explicit or implicit knowledge of the business and the market) leaves the product specialist clueless.

Check out this well-designed site with case studies and background information. There are also University of British Columbia business courses on EdX (just open them separately) and there are plenty of credits to them as well. For economics, I recommend Paul Krugman’s book to students.

A/B testing is often used by product managers as a product approach even when working with funnels. A/B testing of a product allows to test product hypotheses and compare the impact of different product features. Similar methods when used with furniture allow (as in marketing) to test different parts of the channel. Both of these uses help bring the product closer to perfection.

This tutorial is short and suitable for PMs, and there is also a book by Siroker, Koomen and Harshman.

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Designing MVPs, MAPs, MUPs, and other small products is another important aspect of the technology. A PM doesn’t necessarily develop a product to test it, he can start by testing the funnel and then, if the funnel is successful enough, start development. The key to creating an MVP is stripping