Uncommon Advice to Young People Who Want to Succeed in Product Management
Becoming a great product manager isn’t about acquiring hard skills. So what makes a great product manager?
I remember when I joined an early stage startup and started to develop hard skills. I learned SQL and JavaScript to gain autonomy and engineers’ respect. While I learned the hard skills, the decisions we made weren’t better. We didn’t move faster, nor did the the team respect me more.
When I started my career in product I looked up to the Google Product Manager. He had an engineering background and other hard skills. I assumed this is what a great product manager was like. I was wrong.
Being a great product manager isn’t about hard skills.
Thankfully, I was attached to some smart and forgiving people who let me learn under them. They showed me that being a great product person was enabled with having a great attitude, having empathy for your customers, and influencing your peers with rational thinking. As a result, I became great at my job and I grew into senior product roles. I eventually joined Intercom as a product manager, one of my dream companies to work for.
Here’s some advice for anyone who wants to succeed in product management. I’d like to share these tips with you because I’ve learned that this is the kind of advice that many of us a professionals tend to overlook or assume is not important.
1. Be passionate
If you’re going to work extra long hours on something like managing products — you better love doing it. If you love it you have a greater chance at being a great product professional.
For myself — making humans’ lives easier with beautiful and useful software products is where my passion comes from.
2. Love human contact
Product management is all about building with humans, for humans. You work with a product team. You talk with customers. You talk with the marketing, business and design teams.
If you can’t use your empathic abilities to collect multiple opinions, you’ll have a hard time making the best decisions for customers.
3. Love to learn
In your business market, a competitor launched a new innovation, and you’ll need to understand how that innovation adds value, in order to determine ways that you and/or your team can respond with innovations of your own. A coding language you use becomes discontinued and you and your team will have to ramp up on a more relevant coding language to ensure the product functions successfully and performs in the market.
You need to learn constantly. The technology world changes fast. These changes can have a drastic impact on your business.
4. Educate yourself
No one is ever going to teach you enough or hand knowledge to you on a platter. I learned this one from observing one of my most talented friends. They’re constantly learning something new, building up new passions. This often leads them to reinvent themselves.
Ask questions — an endless amount of them.
5. Be patient
It takes time to collect feedback. It takes time to prioritize something in the roadmap, and it takes time to build products. Not understanding this and being impatient only leads to mistakes. Impatience also creates unstable product strategies. This is why product managers must stay patient and always constructively challenge the roadmap and make updates.
Building a great product takes time.
6. Care about details
To set a high-quality bar you need to spot issues, including the small but annoying ones.
Product managers are responsible for the quality of product delivery.
7. Invest in communication
At times product managers move data from customer feedback to the product development team to ensure product design decisions are based on well informed insights. Product managers move data from the product development team to the marketing team to ensure marketing understands what the product is capable of so that they can generate the right kind of product marketing strategy.
Product managers ultimately have the responsibility of moving valuable information from one place of the organization to another.
8. Be sane
A product manager’s job is to communicate with stakeholders, and you need to appear neutral but have strong opinions, comparable to a referee. In these scenarios, the point isn’t to prove that you’re capable, but to also prove that you’re sane.
If you don’t look sane, people won’t trust you.
9. Enjoy technical discussions
Many experts have expressed that you don’t need to have a computer science background or be very technical to become a great product manager. However, technical discussions are going to be part of your day to day work, and you could be in conversations about APIs, webhooks, server side VS machine side, scrum, kanban, etc. People who are technically inclined and like to systematically check how things are being made typically have this trait. If you are not familiar with these topics, I suggest you watch YouTube videos about APIs and webhooks. Watching these videos is a good crash test to make sure you’ll like the job.
Get familiar with these technical topics, and even enjoy talking about them.
10. Forget credit
Please do not obsess about getting credit for product development work. Forget about it. Forget about it so much — you’re glad when other people get credit instead of you.
That’s your job as a product manager — to make other people look better.
11. Remember that you are not special
It’s like what I mentioned earlier — it’s not because I collected hard skills that I was better. I became better when I started learning how to make the lives of my team and the lives of other humans better.
There were a thousand other product managers on this path before you and there will be thousands after.
To be a successful product manager, be good at understanding humans, be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
