6 Qualities of a Great Product Manager

(Author: Prasad Thammineni)

http://www.startable.com/2013/10/24/6-qualities-of-a-great-product-manager/

Strategic Thinker

A product manager is a mini-CEO of sorts. He needs to understand the current product strategy
and how it aligns with the overall company strategy. He needs to know the product vision, how it
will generate customer value and what is the differentiating advantage over its competitors.
Once a product manager gets this and is able to clearly articulate it, you would be surprised how
the rest of the firm will rally behind it in order to build a winning product. For the product to be
a long term success, he needs to envision how the product, industry and competition is going to
evolve and develop a long term roadmap.

Passion for products

Product managers should love products. They should be able to recognize and respect great
products. They should look at products and be able to tell what is good, what is inspiring and
what can be improved. If the product manager is truly passionate about the product, it rubs of
the entire team and leads to the development of great products.

Keep Score

In addition to knowing what the game is, a product manager should be able to keep score.
Keeping score means identifying the right metrics and knowing when you have won. Winning
means identifying the current baseline for the metrics and the goal the team would be shooting
for in the next release. Once a product manager is able to accomplish this, everybody in the
team will have clear understanding as to how the game is won. The team is rightfully aligned,
motivated, inspired and innovative.

Ability to Prioritize

One of the key attributes of a product manager is to be able to prioritize the backlog. Once the
product manager and the entire company knows what game is been played and how the score is
kept and won, prioritizing becomes an easy task. The product manager needs to map the
product strategy down to the individual features, and prioritize them in the right order across
phases so as to maximize the winnings. If a product manager is able to do this well, all
stakeholders within the company will buy into the prioritized backlog even though their pet
features have not made the cut.

Collaborative leader
Building a product is a collaborative process and its take a product manager with collaborative
nature to pull it off. Even though a product manager is the leader of the product, most of the
people development team does not report to him. Moreover, product requirements come from
various functional groups and customers and they all are considered important by those
contributing them. In such an environment, a product manager cannot be dictatorial. He needs
to be able to inspire others to follow him. He needs to be able to negotiate while prioritizing the
backlog and appease all stakeholders. He needs to clearly communicate why a particular feature
was chosen over an other one for the current release. At the same time he needs to be
confident, assertive and at times lay down the law since the buck stops with the product leader.

Execution

Product managers need to be biased for action. They need to get things done. In order for a
product to be shipped there are hundreds of things to get done and a product manager should
be able to get down and dirty to get them done. He needs to QA, write marketing copies, edit
HTMLs, mock up wireframes, and even do PR. A product manager needs to do anything needed
to make the product a success.

At the end of the day, product manager need to make things happen. They should have the
ability and qualities to rally the troops, sell them on the vision and march them to victory.

Are their qualities I have missed? Would love to hear your thoughts.

What are the qualities of a good product manager?

Ryan Hoover, Founder, Product Hunt. 2012

- Empower others. People need recognition. Allow the builders to show off their work. Recognize
others’ feature suggestions and ideas. Be humble.

Communicate. Effective communication of new features to the entire team, beyond engineering,
is necessary to support everyone’s job. Sales needs to sell it, support needs to troubleshoot
consumer issues, marketing needs to understand how to position in the market.

Say no. Feedback is Product’s best friend but often it doesn’t fit with corporate strategy or simply
not impactful enough to prioritize. Like any good writer, heavy edits and focus is what creates
great product.

Shepard. The product needs a Shepard as it passes from conception to design to engineering to
consumers. Unable to prioritize a needed feature? Defend with data and supporting evidence.
Development stalled? Find out what’s blocking.

Shield. Stand between engineering and the business team’s requests or questions. Although it
may seem less efficient, productivity will ultimately benefit.

Empathize. Understand customers and internal stakeholders. Their pain and needs may not be
obvious. They are different people.

Decisive. Product must lead. Leaders must be decisive. Quick decisions, even when imperfect,
are better than stagnant ones.

Kill their baby. Some features won’t work out. Sunk costs and ego shouldn’t get in the way of
what’s right for the product and business.

Be naive. Never limit the vision or product based on assumptions or perceived limitations.
Challenge engineering and push limits at the cost of sounding stupid.

Set the vision. Vision drives motivation which leads to transformative product, business success,
and happy teams.

Alan Wells, Worked as a product manager at Zynga, Affinity Labs & Nextive.2011

Good product managers are extremely detail oriented throughout the product development
process. You should be able to identify and resolve inconsistencies in the features/application
you are defining and participate in the entire development process. Driving a quality product to
release may require hundreds of minor adjustments, clarifications and decisions to get to that
highly polished state of a truly great experience.

Good product managers are pragmatic and clear communicators. The specs you write should be
as simple as possible and no simpler. Knowing this line and staying on the right side of it is part
of the art of product management. Your team needs to understand the intention of what should
be created but you need to facilitate this understanding in the most efficient way possible. The
level of communication required varies widely based on the experience of your team, whether
you work together onsite or remotely, the backgrounds of individual team members, etc but as
product manager you should have an instinctive understanding of what information your team
needs from you right now.

Good product managers have enough technical understanding of the product they are creating
to know why some things are difficult to implement and why some things are easy to implement.
Initially you will need help from your engineering team to understand the system you're working
on, but good product managers quickly internalize the basics and can have reasonably accurate
guesses on time and effort required for changes. These guesses will need to be validated with
your engineering team but should be directionally correct as your team is depending on you to
make the calls as to whether a particular feature or change is worth the time required to
implement it. Good product managers can also think about their product from an engineering
perspective and understand how the thing they're specifying fits into the existing patterns,
database structures, etc that already exist in the product.

Good product managers have great relationships with their engineering teams. Product
managers typically have very few direct reports but have to work with many members of the
team to get something successfully released. This means they can't depend on authority to get
things done - product managers must cultivate a strong feeling of collaboration and team work,
so that when you ask someone to put in that extra effort to get the release out the door, they're
willing to do it because they know you would do the same for them.

Good product managers maintain strong ownership and leadership of the build/release/get
feedback/iterate process. In practice this means that a good product manager puts feedback
systems in place (both quantitive and qualitative), actively monitors those systems and uses
those signals to inform future decisions, and is adaptable and willing to quickly change
thinking/approach when data indicates the reality is contrary to a hypothesis.

Good product managers have good taste. A good product manager will strive to get the product
out the door as quickly as possible, but knows when something just isn't ready for prime time
and will be the one to say so. Good product managers are keepers of a great user experience.

Good product managers think of engineering bandwidth as the single most valuable resource on
the planet. They should seek to refine the product development process so that the engineering
team has everything they need to build the product as efficiently as possible. This means that
required documentation is done in advance, concepts are validated with prototypes or other
low-impact tests prior to investing time in full builds, the real data and assets needed are
prepared prior to the dev team needing them. You won't always achieve this level of
preparedness, especially if working in an agile process, but the bar should remain high.

Finally, a less specific but important point: good product managers are prepared to do whatever
is needed to release a quality product. Most of the time this means doing a great job with the
above points, but at times you need to do things that may not exactly fall within your
responsibilities. Do you think there's a need for one final usability test before release? You
should be willing to find the participants yourself. Is the engineering team close but not quite
there on the current release? You should be willing to go buy pizza to keep them going or tell
them all to go home and get some sleep if you think it's better for the team and the product. Is
the QA team having trouble tracking down a particular display bug that's blocking release? You
should be scanning the site with Firebug and trying to find the buggy CSS selector yourself. Good
product managers are ready to get their hands dirty with what whatever needs to happen to
move the product forward.
Todd Hagopian, Fortune 500 Manager (2011)

Innovative & Detail-Oriented

Anyone can manage a team of engineers, or ask for the lowest cost with these benefits. The
best product managers are the ones who can take a look at a prototype (or better yet, a concept)
and quickly analyze different things they could do to take cost out while maintaining the benefits
of the product, or find ways to enhance the benefits for the same cost. A good product manager
will notice improvement opportunities in the first 5 minutes that a marketing guy will not notice
after seeing the product a few dozen times.

Customer-First Attitude

While it is very important for Product Managers to worry about best-cost, innovations, and end-
prices, maintaining a customer-first attitude is crucial. For example, no one cares if you add
additional features for free if the end-user would never actually benefit from them. Also, if you
take out one feature, in the name of cost-reduction, that was crucial for your end-user, your
product will likely fail against competitors offering that same feature. By constantly placing
yourself in your customer's shoes, a product manager can always stay centered on the one
person their product has to impress: The customer.

Learn To Speak "Engineer" and "Marketing"

In most companies, the product manager is the link between the engineers and the marketing
departments. The marketing department will always want things faster, cheaper and better to
make more money sooner. The engineering department will always want more time and money
to get things done right. As a product manager, if you can become fluent in knowing your
audience and what they care about, you will be 100% more effective at delivering a product on-
time and on-cost. Your team's will get along better, your communication will improve, and
everybody will be driving towards the same end-goals.

The 7 Core Traits of a Good Product Manager

April 9, 2013 by Teresa Torres

Empathy
Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand
and share the feelings of another.

More and more we are starting to understand the importance of

empathy. It underlies so many skills related to product
management.

It helps you understand the problem you are trying to solve. It

helps you sell the idea to management, engineers, sales. It helps
you know which problems are big enough pain points to bother
solving in the first place.

2. Active Listening

Like empathy, active listening is required to uncover unmet needs,

to understand how to persuade and influence, and to really get to
the root of an issue.

It’s easy for product to be ego-driven. But this will result in failure
more often than not. To be a good product manager, you need to
deliberately develop active listening skills so that your product
becomes more about your users than about you.

3. Curiosity

It’s hard to be a genuine active listener without also being curious.

A curious product manager will probe for more details, will ask
clarifying questions, will take the time to learn the ins-and-outs of
his or her subject domain.

A curious product manager will research his or her audience, stay

current on technology trends, and will keep an eye on the
competition.
4. Experimenter’s Mindset / Intellectual Honesty

When developing products, it is so easy to convince ourselves that

we are right. But the reality is, more often than not, we are going
to be wrong.

It is critically important that we operate from the assumption that

we are wrong and design experiments to tell us what is truth.

But an experimenter’s mindset is not enough.

We also need intellectual honesty to act on the results of our

experiments. Too often, it’s easy to explain away our results. To
look for the explanation that allows us to still be right. We need to
develop the habit of intellectual honesty to trust our process and
trust our results, even when we are wrong.

5. Basic Understanding of Statistics

It’s hard to know what’s true without a basic understanding of

statistics. I’m no math whiz, but I know enough to know what’s
meaningful data and what should be ignored. Even if you run
great experiments, if you don’t get the statistics right, you won’t
learn anything meaningful.

6. Root Cause Analysis / High Rational IQ

Even with a well-defined experiment and great statistical analysis

there are going to be many times when you have to dig deep to
understand why you got the results that you did. Can you connect
the dots?

Keith E. Stenovich introduces the concept of “rational intelligence”

in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of
Rational Thought, a concept that seems to encompass judgment,
critical thinking, and decision making.

Developing great products is nowhere near formulaic. More often

than not you will have to proceed with incomplete data. You won’t
always know why something happened. Keen critical thinking skills
and the ability to get at the root cause are absolutely necessary.

7. Visual Communication

This one might be a surprise to some of you. I don’t mean the

ability to draw well. I mean the ability to draw well enough to
explore and / or communicate an idea.

Very often the act of sketching an idea opens up new possibilities.

We’ve all experienced the flow of ideas in front of a whiteboard.