Product Management is hard.
But you can learn it.
You are an aspiring Product Manager, want to start a new career in product or look for ways to enhance your knowledge about building digital products? You have come to the right place to kick-start your journey.
Why Do We Need a Product Manager?
An effective product manager plays a vital role in creating valuable products that meet the needs of users. Serving as a bridge between user experience design, engineering, and business, she takes charge of ensuring that the product aligns with the customers' expectations. In other words: a product manager is the value outcome lead for a product.
To build great products, a team needs to have all necessary skills to come up with effective solutions that are
valuable (our customers choose to use it),
viable (works within the constraints of the business),
usable (users can figure out how to use it) and
feasible (we have the skills and technology for the implementation).
The product manager is mainly responsible for value and viability of a solution, while the designer is accountable for ensuring the solution’s usability. And in the end, of course, our engineers must be able to build it.
In this setup, the product managers must contribute a deep knowledge of our users and the data about how our customers engage with our products. In addition, she needs to bring a solid knowledge of the various business constraints to the table: marketing, sales, service, finance, legal, and privacy are typical examples. Finally, she is is expected to track industry trends and the competitive landscape.
Venn diagram by Product Leadership Evangelist Martin Eriksson; PM description based on the great Marty Cagan’s job description for Product Managers. If you ever have the chance to learn from their knowledge – do it.
“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.”
— Deep Nishar // Product Strategist, Investor and former SVP Products & UX at LinkedIn
What Makes a Great Product Manager?
On paper, a product manager’s responsibilities are rather simple: determining what gets build and delivered to the customers next. To excel in doing so, a great product manager does need a long list of skills. The ones we deem to be the Top 5 Product Management skills are listed below.
But there is far more than that; you could excel at most of the domains mentioned below and still “only” be a decent product manager. So what makes the difference? There are multiple answers but we prefer how Julia Austin of Harvard Business School describes it:
The best PMs I have worked with have mastered the core competencies, have a high emotional intelligence, and work for the right company for them.
A must-read for anyone leading a product team is "Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager" by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz, a legend in Silicon Valley, offers invaluable insights on what separates exceptional product managers from mediocre ones. With his no-nonsense writing style, he shares practical advice on everything from market analysis to communication skills.
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Any product or solution will fail if customers don’t need it. Therefore, product managers need to have a distinct understanding of who their users are and what problems they face. On the strategic end, it’s your job to create a vision for a product users really need or want. On an operational level, you need to make sure the team tackles the most important problems first – and evaluate if your solutions really hit the spot.
This is achieved by managing the Product Backlog. The hard truth here is that you usually never get a solution completely right in the first place. So make sure to listen to your customer, learn from feedback and improve on the insights you get.
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Teams can build the best solution to any customer problem. But if it is a complete mismatch to the environment and surrounding organisation, then it is likely never going to reach the customer. This means that the best product managers need to have a deep knowledge about how their business works and what role their product plays in the bigger picture. Know your key stakeholders, understand the business constraints and make sure you deliver solutions consistent with those.
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One of the hardest aspects of creating great products is to manage and deal with people: Stakeholders are trying to get their share, designers create experiences that are rather impossible to build for engineers and customers complain because your team still did not fix last month’s bug. And as if that’s not yet enough, management needs an update on the Q3 objectives. Based on these and similar situations, one of the most overseen qualities of great product management is the ability to listen and communicate with your environment.
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Great product managers need to have a strong technical foundation with respect to the tech stack their product is built on. It is basically possible to manage the creation of digital products without a degree in Computer Sciences or similar experience. It can actually even be helpful to some degree, to be rather naive towards the question of how to build a solution.
But it makes the cooperation with engineers far more efficient, productive and enjoyable, if you can discuss potential ways to go at eye level. We’d even go one step further and say: It’s impossible for a team to build great digital products on the long run, if their product manager does not understand what engineers are talking about. Engineers are the ones responsible for all technical decisions – but you should be able to understand why they took it.
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To deliver a delightful user journey to customers is one of the major aspects of digital product development. The user experience (UX) is what bridges the gap between the users’ needs and the solutions benefits. In a world with several similar solutions to the same problem, UX makes a difference: You have to deliver products that customers enjoy to use and recommend to their friends. Therefore, UX is a key aspect of product management – and great product managers excel at it as well.
Next Steps for Your Learning Journey
In the world of product management, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for success. However, there are some valuable tips to help you continue your learning journey and become a great product manager.
Learn the basics. Having worked through this site, you should have understood what makes a good product manager. Now it’s time to learn the jobs tooling and good practices. There are endless materials available on the topic. Head over to our book recommendations or suggested videos to start right away.
Take a product management online course. Once you have a good understanding of the basics, it could be worth to enroll in a comprehensive online course that covers all aspects of product management. Look for a course that covers topics such as user research, product strategy, product design, and product development.
Join a product management community. Joining a community of product managers can be a great way to learn from others in the field. You can find online communities on platforms like LinkedIn or Reddit. Participate in discussions, ask questions, and share your own experiences to learn from others and expand your knowledge.
Practice makes perfect. As with most other crafts, you will only get so far with theory. The best way to learn product management is to practice and apply what you learnt. Look for opportunities to work on real-world products or projects. If you're already working as a product manager, apply what you learn to your current role. If you're not working in product management yet, look for opportunities to work on side projects or volunteer for product management roles in your community.
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