The 3 Leadership Skills Every Product Manager Should Master

Product Manager is a hybrid position that requires three key skills: technology, business and people.

In this post you’ll learn about the top 3 leadership skills every product manager needs to master in order to grow from a good PM to an outstanding PM.

#1 Have empathy for your users

You can’t be successful without knowing your users. If you’re not interviewing them, crawling the web for user reviews or watching how they use your competitors’ products then you’re already behind. Step one of building a great product is understanding what’s missing in the lives of your users so you can build something meaningful for them. A large percentage of the world has no idea what it would be like living with chronic pain so empathizing with people who do is essential if you want to create a successful product.

#2 Reduce the number of features and prioritize the rest

Any PM can add more and more features to your product but it takes a truly great PM to cut out the unnecessary ones and get rid of what doesn’t work so you can focus on what does.

#3 Strongly consider not doing it at all

The difference between good and amazing is knowing when not to build something so you can stay true to your vision, users’ needs and resources that are available. Building a great product isn’t about adding more in there for them, it’s about changing how they do things in their lives by letting go of some old habits for new ones. It’s about getting creative with how you solve their problems rather than just adding more band-aids to the real issues.

#4 You don’t know everything they need right now

As a PM you have access to all kinds of information from your engineering, design and marketing teams so you can always position yourself as being ten steps ahead of what is actually needed right now by users. A great PM doesn’t wait until their hand is forced or it becomes an emergency before going for a solution that’s been on the cards since day one, a great PM will seek this information out proactively because they understand how important building a user base with trust in what you do is.  In turn this means there are less surprises about who/what/where/when/why work and how they can jump right in to solving problems.

Informed PMs know all the things they need to do, and understand that no one is going to get it done but them – so it’s a role that relentlessly requires proactive engagement of all involved parties with a focus on always being open about what is going on. It’s also their responsibility to ensure a smooth cross functional team collaboration. This might sound exhausting at first because it requires constant communication with people who have very different backgrounds and motivations from you , but the plus side of taking ownership of your product means you get to work more closely with amazing people, learn new skills and be able to look back years later when you’ve shipped an awesome product and think “I did this”.

#5 – “What happened to the product?”

– When you ask this question it usually means that nobody has any idea what is going on with your product! This might be because you’re not getting enough information from management, or people outside of engineering are making decisions without consulting you (and vice versa), but whatever the reason it’s incredibly frustrating for everyone involved. You’ll know there’s a problem if people stop asking questions about your product and start saying things like “I’m sure it will be back soon”, or “We don’t know”.

#6 – There are competitors now? It seems like no one mentioned them before…

If someone asks why they should use your product over others in the market, ask them why they would want to use it in the first place. It’s possible they need a feature that yours doesn’t have, or maybe your product is better for their use case because of something you haven’t mentioned yet.

#7 – How do I know if my product sucks?

If you’re not sure if your product is any good, ask someone who has never used it before to try it out. Have them go through an existing user flow to see how easy or difficult your product is to use, then ask what could be improved about the flow and why. They may not always come up with things that you didn’t think of already, but don’t write anything off ahead of time and trust that they will give you useful information.

#8 – Why don’t apps suck?

There are several reasons that applications don’t suck, but the first one that comes to mind is an existing user base. If you’ve already built an audience for your application, it’s much easier to justify what you’re doing and also provide meaningful updates (like bug fixes or new features) because you already know there is demand for them.

Another reason is because applications usually have a high barrier to entry — not just in terms of how many users will try the product, but also in terms of how much time it will take for them to learn about all of its functionality. This means that once someone does become a user, they’ll want more out of your app than if it had required less effort up front.