Skills Needed For Product Manager

Skills Needed For Product Manager – Product managers are in demand in almost every industry. 43% of companies plan to hire more product managers in the next few years. These employees provide essential skills to bring a product to market.

Product managers are often considered the Swiss Army Knife of the professional world. These workers need a combination of hard and soft skills to succeed. Product management requires analytical and technical skills in addition to emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.

Skills Needed For Product Manager

Finding the right product manager for your team is not always easy. Many of the skills that make product managers successful cannot be easily measured on a resume. As a result, recruiters need a way to test the strategic thinking, hard skills and communication skills that a product manager needs to do well.

Free Product Manager Resources To Sharpen Your Tech Skills

If you’re thinking about growing your product management team, here are some key skills to look for when hiring, and tools and techniques to help you hone those skills.

The product manager oversees the development of the brand’s products. This person is responsible for coordinating between internal teams for product creation and launch. A product manager is a person who ensures that the product meets the needs of the customers as well as the goals of the company that manufactures it.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager are extensive and can vary from company to company. In general, a product manager develops a product roadmap detailing the activities that must occur from product design and development to product launch and maintenance.

The job description may change depending on the size of your business, the type of product your brand offers, and the needs of your customers. In some companies, the product manager’s role ends after the product is launched. In others, product managers continue to work on the product to ensure good customer service and develop future iterations of the software or product.

The Role Of A Product Manager Explained

When considering what product management skills are important, think about how the product manager role fits into your company’s overall operations. What teams does this person work with and what skills can you add to make life easier for existing internal and external stakeholders?

There are three things to consider when hiring a project manager: hard skills (like core competencies), soft skills like emotional intelligence, and business fit.

The hard skills of a product manager can vary widely. Product technical knowledge helps product ideas to work directly and well with the technical team. A product manager probably does not need, for example, to write technical specifications for a product, but he should be able to understand the technical aspects of product features, as well as be able to do data analysis, have a basic understanding of product development, and do market research.

Soft skills are integral to this role. Special relationship management skills and a high EQ are critical for successful product management. This includes things like active listening, leadership skills, good delegation skills and more.

The Ai Product Manager

While these skills may vary depending on your industry, Harvard Business Review has identified the core skills that every product manager must possess. These skills include the ability to:

Finally, a third consideration when hiring a product manager is whether or not the person is a good fit for your company. When we talk about fit, we don’t mean cultural fit, which can lead to discrimination and unconscious bias that permeates the hiring process. We prefer “organization fit”. Organizational fit describes how well a candidate fits into your organization. Here the candidate’s values ​​and working style play a role, as well as the general values ​​of the organization.

Fortunately, organizational fit is something you can find using the same methods you use to test product management skills. But first, let’s cover what hard and soft skills are required for product management at a deeper level.

Soft skills are personal qualities that people have in relation to their work, also known as interpersonal skills. As a sales director overseeing a product from inception to sales, these soft skills are critical to successful product management.

What Skills Do You Need To Be A Product Manager?

Product managers spend a lot of time working with other teams to ensure deadlines, specifications and budgets are met. Therefore, they need advanced relationship management skills to keep all stakeholders invested in the product and involved in the process.

Communication skills are part of this area. Product managers are often the link between the development team, the engineering team, the sales team and the customer support team. The communication skills that product managers bring to the table prevent these teams from working in silos.

In large companies, product teams often work on many products simultaneously, with multiple product life cycles happening at the same time. Managing the life cycle of even a product requires focus and prioritization. The product manager must organize stakeholders according to the product roadmap, synchronizing deadlines and deliverables in a logical and organized manner. Strong time management is also a soft skill that comes into play in a product management role.

Product managers must use critical thinking at every stage of product development. The product manager is often the go-to person for questions or product feedback. They are expected to remain objective and evaluate the product on behalf of the potential end user and overall business goals. This often requires market research and the integration of customer feedback into the product vision and roadmap.

The Hard Skills Of A Product Manager

A successful product manager is able to use leadership skills to rally internal teams to product success. They can delegate tasks and perform difficult management skills, such as managing a budget or following an agile methodology. Leadership and management skills often require a high level of emotional intelligence to ensure that each person involved in each stage of product development is successful.

Eventually even the best laid plans go awry – especially in product development. The ability to adapt, think strategically and adapt in the face of obstacles is an incredibly important product manager skill. This is also where prioritization skills come in handy: If the schedule slips a bit, can your product manager focus the team?

Product management skills can also be technical in nature. These so-called hard skills provide the foundation for successful product managers to do their best work.

Market research is the main task of product managers. The product manager should have extensive knowledge of the competitive landscape; if they don’t have experience in your field, being able to research is key. Conducting research can help a product manager understand your existing users, come up with new product ideas, and work with internal teams to ensure they have the resources they need to succeed. With extensive market research, senior product managers can also be part of product vision and idea generation.

Sample Resume Of Technical Product Manager With Template & Writing Guide

Hard skills such as budget management, time management, and resource allocation are part of product management. A product manager often needs to know basic financial skills: for example, the difference between revenue and profit, budgeting, cash flow, and reading the income statement (P&L). This role also includes client management.

Product managers must perform data analysis to make informed product decisions. Once the market research is complete, the product manager must gather insights from the data to inform the entire product roadmap. Can the product manager identify customer needs and use their analytical skills to ensure the product solves those pain points?

Finally, some product managers benefit from a basic understanding of technical skills such as design, coding languages ​​or even sales. For example, Google requires its product managers to pass a technical skills test, no matter what product they work on. A senior product manager in particular can benefit from technical skills that help them understand what the engineering or development team is really thinking.

Clearly, great product management requires a wide variety of skills. How can companies test product management skills when so many skills are required?

Resume Skills And Keywords For Product Manager (updated For 2023)

Skill tests can cover all these skills and more. A tool like this is able to honor its hard and soft skills in a user-friendly experience. Their teams can use our pre-configured product manager skills assessment test, which assesses things like communication skills, product management, collaboration and prioritization skills.

Our Product Manager Skills Test gives candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to work with multiple enterprise teams, manage a product, understand its features and capabilities, and be an advocate for key stakeholders to gain buy-in and alignment and To build awareness throughout the enterprise. . – wide.

Alternatively, teams can choose their employees from our library of product management reviews to find another one that fits their specific industry. Customize our Growth Product Manager Skills Assessment or Analytics Product Manager Skills Assessment or make it unique to your company.

Tests of a combination of hard and soft skills remove bias from the equation. And our AI matching tool ensures that candidates get a fair chance by sending your team a ranked list of candidates that no one leaves out.

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