Traits of a Great Product Manager

Have you ever felt that you’ve entirely tanked it? Shipped a feature that was perceived terribly by customers; did an experiment that didn’t yield any actionable result; didn’t think through a solution, which led to unreliable effort estimation and a Sprint disaster, etc. Were you able to pick yourself back up and tell what you’ve learned? If so, you have the learning skills that a PM needs.

Did you have to shift to a new domain quickly, say, like a gardener learning how to cook? Did you have to back someone up instantly and decide things you aren’t familiar with? Were you more thrilled than nervous? If so, you have the passion that’ll help you to learn.

Product Management is an exciting job. There’s something new every day. To fully enjoy this job, one needs to enjoy learning. This could involve learning new things or learning from mistakes.

There are many academic and pragmatic structures for learning new things, but in the Product Management context, if we first dissect the “new things”, we are actually learning these usual suspects:

• Who are we doing this for?

• What are they trying to achieve?

• Why are we doing this and not other things?

Answering the above questions gives you a solid picture of the personas, the user journey, as well as the value proposition the product carries.

It’s also meaningful to ask, what other jobs to be done these personas may have that aren’t covered in our product? Back to the gardener learning to cook, for example, a chef typically owns the menu, the cooking, and the provisioning. In the meantime, the chef also takes care of the sous chef, who may ask questions and require guidance. This helps us paint a holistic picture of our target personas and helps us understand their pains and desires more profound and better.

Learning from our mistakes is celebrated in Agile frameworks in the form of collective retrospectives and post-mortems, for instance, where the Engineering team, UX, and PM sit together and reflect. Yet, PMs encounter plenty of small and meaningful self-reflecting opportunities on a daily basis:

• Do a debrief. We’ve all had those noticeably unproductive meetings. It’s normal to burn in frustration a little. But it’s more helpful to think about how we can do it better the next time: ensure the right attendance, emphasize the goal, prepare better before the meeting, etc.

• Ask open questions. When a stalemate happens, try to understand the causes by asking open questions. You’ll learn that with the highest motivation, quality tools, and an outstanding team, the reason that a chef couldn’t deliver dinner was due to the lack of ingredients. You’ll learn to double-check provisions the next time.

• Ask for feedback. Although we commonly sit in hours of meetings every day, communicating and collaborating, we rarely talk about ourselves. Ask the people who work closely with us what they think of our way of working, e.g., communication, team spirit, and problem-solving. You’ll learn what you did well and where to improve.

After all, it’s more about doing and getting better, than getting it absolutely right from the start. Having the aptitude and attitude to learn is enough. The rest will come in time.