What are the core skills that every product person should master?
Sharing from the community.
A few days ago, I was at a session hosted monthly by the Ladies in Product community here in Barcelona. And the topic of the session was this:
What are the core skills every PM should master?
It was one of my favourite sessions out of all the sessions I’ve attended because of the rich responses that everybody shared. And because I felt that the responses were so good, I’d share what everybody talked about here so you can take value from it, too.
Important to note that these responses don’t just apply to Product Managers. I believe every function, whether or not you’re working in tech, can find these valuable too.
So let’s get to it!
side note: If you’re a woman in Product, I’d highly recommend joining the Ladies in Product community!
01 Follow the Money
People talk a lot about knowing the impact of the product you’re building. But a lot of the impact we usually talk about is impact on the end users. And while that’s not wrong, it IS missing an important half of the role that we do as Product people.
Yes, we’re supposed to bring value to users by solving their problems. BUT let’s not forget that by solving problems, we’re supposed to bring value to the business, too.
So as early as now, figure out how what you’re building is contributing to the business’s goals… money-wise. How much money is your product bringing in? How much money is your product and team costing? What’s the ROI?
The sooner you do this and make this part of your conversations, the sooner you can have richer conversations with your stakeholders (who are likely already thinking about money) and your leadership (who are definitely already thinking about money).
You can bring a whole new dimension to prioritization with using potential monetary value as an input.
The truth also is, the higher you go up the ladder, money becomes your concern and your call. So the sooner you get comfortable about incorporating money, talking about money, etc… the sooner you’ll speak with influence, prioritize with more confidence, and even argue your perspective with more meat because you’re doing it now from the dimension of the users AND the business (and the technology even, if you have that context).
02 Expand your way of thinking
A lot of people will say that you need to be more strategic or get good at communication, but I believe that you can get good at those things if you get good at your thinking.
And the best way to get good at thinking is to expand it through diversifying your input.
Go beyond your team, go beyond your organization and business, heck go beyond your market/industry.
Learn different ways of thinking and seeing things so you can build even more perspectives about how things can work. There’s not just one way things can go. There are millions.
The more perspectives you can filter through, the more opportunities you’ll see.
I wrote more about this in last week’s newsletter.
03 Build relationships + Learn how to influence
This is always talked about but needs emphasis all the time. Especially since politics will always be part of the “building companies” game. And a lot of people shy away from it (if not completely avoid it) because politics has always had a dirty association. Politics has been seen as manipulation.
But the way I see it is that politics is really about gaining influence.
And influence is more subtle. You don’t gain influence just by being the best person in the room with the strongest ideas or arguments.
You gain influence because people feel that they can trust you.
And the truth is that influence is what gets you climbing the ladder if that’s what you’re after. You’ll need people to listen to you if you want to move the organization towards a certain direction. But people will likely listen to somebody who makes them feel heard, seen, and considered. Somebody they trust.
The wider and stronger the relationships you build are, the more opportunities you’ll end up opening for yourself. Inside and outside your organization.
As a friend said, relationships + influence compound over time. It’ll be the gift that keeps on giving.
Case 1: Some of my clients are getting opportunities for work not through applying for roles but through their network. They’re having conversations with people they’ve worked with about open opportunities in their friends’ organizations, allowing them to bypass a lot of steps in the normal hiring process.
Case 2: Another client got promoted less than one year of joining the company even if the policy (and even the VP) clearly said that’s not possible. But the relationships they’ve built with their stakeholders and the good feedback they’ve gotten from the senior stakeholders they work with got them bypassing the policy.
I created a mini coaching guide on how to create trust and build influence here.
04 Learn to be flexible
I personally love this, and this point was what we returned to over and over again the entire night.
We all know this; the reality of building products differs from company to company. It even differs from team to team inside the SAME company.
And things never stay the same. Reorgs happen. New strategies are introduced every quarter. Somebody new joins the team because somebody left. And so on and so forth.
Be single-minded about the vision. But let go of your grip on the how and the when.
To grip our own definition of how things should go so tightly only creates stress and frustration, which can limit your perspective and hinder you from finding solutions that matter over time. Not to mention it can make you sick.
Being flexible asks you to be curious about the why behind the things that are happening.
And I love what Lucia mentioned in a Linkedin comment discussion, too. It helps you separate your identity from work. The changes that are happening, the way things go, are not a definition of who you are nor of your worth and value.
05 Know your strengths and learn to take advantage of them
An old manager of mine always used to tell me, we get more ROI from using our strengths than we do spending time trying to fill in our gaps.
The thing is that a lot of us don’t even know what our strengths are. We usually discount what comes easy or natural for us as not that. But that’s exactly what strengths are. They come easy and natural.
So find out what comes easy for you. Find out how you would naturally untangle your knots. And experiment with how you can expand its usage. Can you use your strengths to solve problems, build relationships, see opportunities?
We spend a lot of time running after things that we can get better at. And while that’s not wrong, it's also a lot of time and energy to invest. Especially when we’re so good at spotting things that we think we need to be better at and focus there.
Sometimes the best course of action is to get clear on the problem to solve and see the many ways it can already be solved and acknowledge that the solution might already be present.
The more we get better at using our strengths, the more we can actually create space for ourselves to improve on other things vs trying to manage an existing problem and learning how to solve it at the same time.
07 Get good at taking care of yourself and at trusting yourself
Very related to the previous point. You are already amazing at what you do, and you’re just getting better and better every day in all the ways that truly matter.
Trust that you can always make the best decision to the best of your abilities at any given point in time.
Trust that whatever happens, you’ll always land on your feet.
Trust that your value and your worth are something you decide on and not on the circumstances that are unfolding in front of you.
Trusting yourself becomes easier when you’re also good at taking care of yourself. When you’re aware of what you truly need, and you can give it to yourself first.
Give yourself rest. Give yourself joy. And give yourself confidence.
When you’re able to zoom out from your situation, you’re able to see more. When you can widen your perspectives, you can spot more opportunities. When you trust yourself, you can confidently take those opportunities you’ve seen.
08 Create space for stillness and spaciousness
The cognitive load these days are real. We’re all being pushed to do more and produce more because now we can. Context switching is at an all-time high. The irony of being overloaded in your mind is that it makes it harder to think more. It just makes you think narrowly.
Creative and critical thinking needs space in your mind. And stillness creates space.
It might feel counterintuitive to actually pause and take a step back, but it’s actually what’s necessary to be able to move forward with clarity and confidence. So find time to quiet your mind. Find time to just observe the thoughts that are crowding in your head and learn to identify which one needs to be let go. Create the space for perspective to come in.
Get good at these things, and you can always figure out a way to thrive whether it’s as a PM or something else.
Get good at these things and the “Age of AI” becomes less scary and less frustrating, and it just becomes another thing that’s happening to the industry regardless of what people are publishing left and right.
Get good at these things, and you can navigate the infinite cycles of change that will always be present whether in your life or in your career.
We're always told to get good at prioritizing, get good at being strategic, or improve our communication. But the way I see it, these things are tools. They’re important, especially for people building products, BUT these skills are only as good as the foundation we use them with. Our core.
There are probably more that should be added to this list, but we only had one hour in that session and ran out of time. Lol.
Are there more you would like to add to this list? Share them in the comments below.
I help Product, Engineering, Design, and other functional experts working in Tech not only become effective leaders but also be the leaders they aspire to be, minus the existential crisis and risk of burnout.
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