The Complete Guide to 16 Skills for Top 1% Product Manager
How to become a product manager every business would kill for
This week I would like to explore which skills a PM should prioritize when aiming to be among the best of the craft.
Excelling as a PM requires the most diverse skill set of any tech role, from understanding your market to executing effectively, communicating clearly, and mastering business fundamentals.
This newsletter breaks down the 16 essential skills you need, into 5 categories:
Product-Market Fit
Execution
Communication
Business
Traits
Whether you're a seasoned PM or just starting your journey, mastering these skills will help you stand out and drive your products to success. Dive in and discover how you can elevate your career to the next level.
Product-Market Fit
Achieving product-market fit is crucial for any product's success. It involves deeply understanding your customers, the industry, and the competitive landscape to ensure that your product meets real needs.
This category focuses on knowing your customers' problems, and industry dynamics, discovering the right solutions. Mastering these skills helps a PM create products that resonate with users and thrive in the market.
1. Customer knowledge
A great PM knows the daily struggles and needs of their customers. This understanding helps in creating solutions that truly make a difference.
The best way to understand customers is by engaging with them directly. Spend time talking to them, learning about their daily routines, and identifying their pain points. Combine this with quantitative methods, like analyzing data, to get a complete picture. This mix ensures you get both the personal and the statistical insights needed to get a deep understanding of you customer.
2. Industry knowledge
Understanding the market, trends, and key players gives you the edge to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
To excel in this area, stay updated with industry news, attend relevant conferences, and follow thought leaders. Networking with industry peers can provide valuable insights and different perspectives. Regularly analyzing competitor products helps you understand where your product stands to identify opportunities for improvement.
3. Product Discovery
Product discovery is about finding solutions and understanding the risks associated with different approaches. A top PM must balance innovation with careful evaluation to only make tiny steps or huge bets.
The importance of product discovery lies in its ability to reduce risks. By understanding the potential impact of different solutions, PMs can make informed decisions without making huge bets. This careful evaluation process helps create products that succeed in the market and truly resonate with customers.
4. Product Sense
A PM with a strong product sense has an intuition for how customers will react to different actions, which can be developed by having launched multiple products before. This intuition is crucial when data is scarce or when working on completely new, greenfield projects.
Having a well-developed product sense sets apart a junior PM from a senior one. It allows for making informed decisions even in the absence of data. This understanding helps in anticipating customer needs and crafting features that truly resonate.
Execution
Execution is how plans turn into reality. For a PM, it's about ensuring that the team efficiently builds and delivers the product. This involves setting clear priorities, managing resources, and maintaining momentum throughout the development process. Effective execution requires a deep understanding of user needs, sharp analytical skills, and the ability to make tough decisions.
By focusing on execution, a PM can transform strategic vision into tangible results, driving the product’s success in the market.
5. User Research
Talking to customers to understand what drives them and how your product is helping them (or not) is a key skill for top PMs. This deep dive into customer behavior and motivations ensures that the product aligns with their needs and expectations.
PMs should engage with customers as often as possible. Regular interaction helps to stay updated on customer feedback and changing needs. Effective user research includes methods like interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
6. Analytics / Data
Good PMs know how to dive deep into data and interpret it effectively. Find the right balance, avoiding overinterpretation while extracting meaningful insights. Knowing what to look for in the data is key to making informed decisions.
Data and analytics guide the decision-making process by providing statistical evidence to support or challenge gut feelings. This approach ensures that decisions are based on solid evidence rather than assumptions. Regularly reviewing and analyzing key metrics helps PMs stay on track and make adjustments as needed to align with user needs and business goals.
7. Prioritization
Prioritization is crucial on multiple levels. Firstly, PMs must decide what their team should focus on and what can be ignored. With countless customer requests and bugs, not everything can be addressed. A PM needs to effectively prioritize this to ensure the most critical issues are handled.
Additionally, PMs often have a diverse range of responsibilities. Prioritizing their own time is just as important as prioritizing for their team. Balancing immediate needs with long-term goals, and ensuring that both personal and team efforts are aligned with overall product objectives, is key to maintaining productivity and pushing for success.
8. Delivery
Successful delivery in product management is about effective collaboration with design and engineering teams. A good PM understands the processes of both designers and engineers, from the initial sketch to the shipped product, ensuring smooth and efficient work.
A PM needs to support these functions during the building phase. This involves knowing when to make decisions and when to empower the team to make decisions independently. Striking this balance helps in maintaining momentum and meeting timelines.
Communication
A top PM must excel in various forms of communication to ensure that everyone involved in the product is aligned and informed. This involves managing relationships with stakeholders, crafting clear and persuasive written documents, delivering engaging presentations, and evangelizing the product both within and outside the organization.
Mastering these skills enables a PM to build consensus, drive product vision, and ensure that the team and stakeholders are working towards common goals.
9. Stakeholder management
Stakeholder management is essential for PMs who must "lobby" for their goals and objectives within the company. Often, the team works on initiatives that may not perfectly align with other departments' interests. A PM who cannot effectively manage stakeholders may find them pushing in different directions, which can be a significant barrier to reaching their goals.
PMs frequently receive requests from various stakeholders, from the CEO to Sales, each wanting something different in the product. PMs need to be masters at advocating for the right initiatives rather than giving in to whoever is the loudest. This ensures that the product remains focused on delivering the most value.
10. Writing
PMs must communicate with many stakeholders through various channels, including strategy documents, product requirement documents, emails, and many more. A significant portion of a PM's time is spent crafting written content to persuade others to follow a direction they believe is crucial for success.
Clear and compelling writing helps to convey ideas effectively, ensure everyone is on the same page, and drive the product forward. Being able to articulate vision, requirements, and updates in a way that resonates with different audiences is key to a PM's success.
11. Presenting
PMs must communicate roadmaps, launches, and other key updates to a diverse set of stakeholders. A successful PM can confidently address both executives and technical audiences, understanding their unique concerns and interests.
Preparing for presentations involves knowing your audience, simplifying complex ideas for non-technical stakeholders, and providing detailed insights for technical ones. Keeping the audience engaged with clear, concise, and compelling storytelling ensures that your message is understood and acted upon.
12. Evangelism
PMs have to evangelize their product, promoting its value both within the organization and to the external market. This involves passionately communicating the product’s vision, benefits, and successes to get everyone on board, from internal teams to potential customers.
Effective evangelism requires a PM to be a compelling storyteller, using real-world examples and success stories to highlight the product's impact. Engaging in presentations, demos, and active participation in industry events can help build excitement and support for the product. Internally, consistent communication and enthusiasm can motivate teams and align them toward common goals, ensuring that everyone is invested in the product’s success.
Business
A successful PM must have a strong grasp of business fundamentals. This category emphasizes the importance of understanding go-to-market strategies and product financials. By knowing how to launch products effectively and ensuring they contribute to the company’s financial success, PMs can drive growth and profitability.
13. Go-to-Market
The PM's job isn't finished once the product is built; they must ensure that customers adopt it and prospects hear about it. The go-to-market strategy is about more than just launching a new feature—it's about contributing to the company's financial success.
Effective go-to-market involves close collaboration with product marketing to communicate the product's value and ensure the sales team understands the benefits and problems the product solves. This skill is about ensuring that any launch is impactful, driving adoption, and supporting the company's growth objectives.
14. (Product) Financials
Financial metrics are essential for a PM to make decisions that drive the right business outcomes. A PM well-versed in metrics like LTV (Lifetime Value), CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), and profitability can guide their product strategy to align with the company's financial goals.
A PM should be the advocate for business viability within their team. This means understanding what makes a product financially viable and using these insights to influence decisions. By balancing financial considerations with customer needs and development goals, a PM ensures that their product not only delights users but also contributes positively to the company's bottom line.
Traits
Exceptional PMs possess key personal traits that set them apart. Proactivity and pragmatism are two essential traits. Proactive PMs anticipate challenges and opportunities, leading their teams with a clear vision and strategy. Pragmatic PMs balance ideal solutions with practical constraints, making decisions that drive real outcomes.
15. Proactivity
Proactivity is essential for PMs, who often don't have a clear set of daily tasks. A proactive PM identifies and works on opportunities that could significantly benefit the company, rather than just responding to incoming requests.
A proactive PM works on things that they have not been “assigned”. They shape a product’s direction with a strong vision and strategy. This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also anticipates future challenges and opportunities. By being proactive, a PM can lead the team towards impactful goals, making a meaningful difference beyond merely reacting to random requests.
16. Pragmatism
PMs often need to balance ideal solutions with practical constraints. PMs are frequently the ones advocating for pragmatic approaches when different stakeholders push towards extremes.
Pragmatic PMs make decisions that prioritize outcomes over rigid adherence to processes, even if these decisions are unpopular with stakeholders or engineering teams. This ability to push for practical, effective solutions ensures that the product moves forward and meets its goals, despite the complexities and challenges involved. Balancing idealism with realism, a pragmatic PM ensures that the team focuses on what truly matters for the product's success.
Conclusion
Mastering these 16 skills across Product-Market Fit, Execution, Communication, and Business will set you apart from the rest.
Keep improving and stay curious!
(List of all skills below for you to copy & use)
Product-Market Fit
1. Customer Knowledge
2. Industry Knowledge
3. Product Discovery
4. Product Sense
Execution
5. User Research
6. Analytics / Data
7. Prioritization
8. Delivery
Communication
9. Stakeholder management
10. Writing
11. Presenting
12. Evangelism
Business
13. Go-to-market
14. (Product) Financials
Traits
15. Proactivity
16. Pragmatism