Think as a Product Manager: Key Traits and Focus Areas
Product management has been around for a while, way before the internet, and even before people coined the terminology. This has led me to consider digital product management from a broader perspective. Let’s begin with a shared definition:
“Product managers are those people who discover problems, design solutions, and manage their implementation from idea to production.”
On its own, product management can be a stressful job. It involves collaborating with various teams involved in the product, such as business development, marketing, design, and technology. Multitasking, processing large amounts of data daily, maintaining constant communication, and living with a degree of uncertainty are all part of the role. People often say that the persistence of these factors over the long term can lead to burnout.
I believe that the cause of burnout is more related to what you do and who you work with than the volume of tasks. Additionally, one’s personality plays a significant role. You can learn to manage, analyze, design, and sell, but you can’t learn to be comfortable with the factors mentioned earlier. Therefore, it’s essential to be honest with yourself about your suitability for this role; otherwise, you might end up disliking your job, which is nobody’s fault but a mismatch.
I define product management as a mindset based on certain traits and focus areas. I’ve come up with my list, and you should create your own if you haven’t already. Let’s review what I have on my side:
Cross-niche vs Domain-oriented
This is a long-standing dilemma, and voters on both sides of it are quite strong. Indeed, there are sound advantages and disadvantages to each perspective.
Focusing on a particular niche can be highly beneficial for a product manager. Over time, you develop an intuition for events in your product and the market. Additionally, you build a network and accumulate deep knowledge of the field, which only comes with spending a certain amount of time in it. However, not many product managers have spent their entire careers in a single niche, and they have valid reasons for choosing that. Life is uncertain in most places on Earth. To protect ourselves against this uncertainty, we aim to acquire as much knowledge as possible, making ourselves versatile and valuable in various situations. Eventually, we become accustomed to this lifestyle, and the stress that accompanies challenges starts to feel like a necessity.
Your life can become more interesting but also more stressful when you frequently change domains. Also, your life can be more secure, but you may worry that after working as a product manager in a single domain for over a decade, you could become too inflexible. The ultimate decision depends on a combination of your character, your current life circumstances, and your ability to reflect. I’m not here to say that one of these approaches is good and another is bad. What I want is to focus on seeing things for what they are.
Product managers with diverse backgrounds certainly have advantages in the job market. The drawback is that there is less room for relaxation and executing your role if you continually need to learn something new in parallel. Moreover, this learning often needs to happen quickly. If you’re contemplating a job change, carefully consider the factors influencing your choice of workplace. If you’ve changed domains in the past, reflect on whether it was driven by interest, necessity, or perhaps because you’ve grown accustomed to the stress.
Analytical
As a product manager, you must be aware of the logical consequences underlying each situation you’re responsible for. This comes with logical thinking, a skill we develop and refine throughout our lives, starting from early childhood. Often, this process happens in the background, and we’re not consciously aware of it, which is perfectly fine. However, for a manager, it’s essential to consciously develop this skill.
Besides basic logical thinking, there are routine improvements we need to make. For starters, we should have a good understanding of where to obtain data. Nowadays, digital products can generate gigantic amounts of data, but attempting to gather all available information carries a high risk of getting lost and distorting your product vision as a result.
Exercise caution with data; prioritize selecting your metrics. Build a metrics pyramid that aligns with your business goals and customer needs. While you can seek advice from various product leaders on creating a metrics pyramid, ultimately, you’ll need to craft a unique one tailored to your product.
Once you know what you’re seeking, you’ll have a clearer picture of the tools that will assist you. The current market offers a variety of analytical software, such as Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Appinsights, etc. As a product manager, you should be proficient at evaluating options and choosing the most suitable ones. You may utilize different software to gather data about customer behavior, but ensure all data is integrated to avoid losing valuable insights.
Creative
There’s a significant possibility that you may have doubts about your creativity. Are you genuinely creative? Many people have experienced this uncertainty. On one hand, measuring creativity is challenging, and on the other hand, our perception of creativity is often distorted by viewing it as a unique trait possessed only by exceptionally talented individuals. But that’s not the case.
In reality, creativity is a trait that every human possesses. However, like any trait, it varies in maturity. If you want to boost your creativity, practice is essential. Some people may progress faster, while others may advance more slowly, and that’s perfectly normal.
There’re many cool and easy excercises to train the process of creative thinking. Here’s one of those: Look around and choose a physical object from your surroundings, like a table, chair, laptop, or pen. Now, brainstorm how you can use it in various scenarios. Initially, it might be challenging, especially if you’re accustomed to how you and others typically use the object. However, with practice, generating new ideas becomes easier, training our neural networks to think “outside the box.”
Empathetic
As product managers, we must build numerous communication bridges with a wide range of people. In a single day, we may engage in discussions with design and development teams, stakeholders, and possibly even more. Furthermore, we need to take the lead in most of these conversations.
Effective communication entails more than just understanding the content of the discussions; it involves empathy. It’s not enough for a product leader to be merely communicative. In all conversations, we should prioritize being human. To achieve this, we must learn how people feel about different situations, not just what they think.
For developing empathetic communication, I recommend exploring the NVC (Nonviolent Communication) approach. Developed by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1980s, it has been widely employed across organizations to resolve conflicts and foster meaningful relationships.
Managing
Nobody is inherently born a manager. Becoming one depends on actively developing a set of skills. You can define your own set of skills, just as I have defined mine, which includes systems thinking, effective communication, and resource utilization. The best way to grow as a manager is to take the initiative, reflect on your actions, and gradually enhance them.
If your aspiration is to be a great product manager, I suggest starting by defining what greatness means to you as a manager. From there, you can narrow it down to how you define a great product manager. The path to achieving this is to cultivate a management mindset based on your interests, strengths, weaknesses, personality, and goals.
Finally, here’s a more practical tip: Understanding the fundamental processes underlying the business you wish to manage is essential. Analyze the market, define the product you want to work on, brainstorm how to organize the work, identify the necessary resources, plan for handling changes in the product, and delineate your responsibilities. The more questions you pose to yourself, the more active your analytical and systems thinking will be.
In Conclusion
Being a product manager is more than just a role; it’s a mindset that involves developing various facets of your personality, including analytical and systems thinking, communication and empathy, domain knowledge, and management. The best place to start is by envisioning the type of manager you aspire to be and how that person should behave. Analyze your niche, stay informed about new products and customer demands, engage in conversations with various individuals in your field to gain different perspectives, and continuously enhance your communication skills.
