Profile of an excellent Product Manager: 3 Key Factors
Background
Searching for “what makes a successful product manager?” will bring up pages and pages of articles from renowned product leaders and random bloggers (myself included), all sharing their opinion of what it takes to do the job well.
Despite the masses of material available, I’ve still never seen anything that fully captures the multiple dimensions required to do the job well and to move up over time. So here I am, adding to the pile!
Hard Skills
Notice I said “hard skills” and not necessarily “experience.” Having been a product manager does not automatically mean you are an effective one. Generalizing a bit, I see too many hiring managers and companies focusing on prior pedigree, whether education or big name former employers. Product managers certainly need some core skills:
Quantitative analysis
Understanding of key technologies
General business concepts and understanding of business functions
Industry / vertical knowledge
Product Manager domain knowledge
In my experience having the right level of these skills is more important than where you got them. I’ve also placed them in what I consider to be priority order when evaluating someone’s potential. Industry and domain knowledge can certainly accelerate how long it takes for someone to get up to speed, but they can also be picked up relatively quickly if everything else is off the charts. Too many people focus on industry and domain knowledge over the other hard skills and in general put too much on hard skills as a category overall.
Personality
At least as important as hard skills are the dynamic qualities of each individual human being, which I’m calling “personality” for lack of a better term. While hard skills are not always a great predictor of success, not having these key personality traits is almost always a predictor of careers stalling out or worse. The best product managers I’ve seen have:
Empathy and a desire and ability to understand others
A strong sense of ownership
The confidence to lead and don’t have to be asked to do so
Attention to detail
Curiosity
Open to changing their mind - if the new data shows up they reset and get everyone on board
Selflessness / Humility - they are focused on the goal, not the credit
You might get a few “tell me about a time when” questions during an interview, but I find they don’t often add up to provide any kind of complete picture, nor do they always touch on these elements. Once people are hired as a product manager, it's even less common to receive feedback and coaching on these dimensions. It’s really important to screen for the ideal profile up front because coaching to improve these dimensions of personality can be extremely difficult.
A New Angle: Judgement
The idea to start Product Leaders really came out of some personal excitement around the idea of improving decision making ability as applied to product management. If you had to sum the whole job up in one phrase, “good judgement” definitely rises to the top. Ironically there’s not much in the way of training available to most people, let alone specific to product managers, to hone this critical skill. I personally made it through two undergraduate degrees and an MBA and I think I had two courses that mentioned decision making explicitly.
As I started researching this topic more and more it really became clear to me that judgement is influenced by a few key factors:
Frameworks & Best Practices - so much of making a good decision is following the right process
Awareness of Biases - in yourself and in others
Data Orientation - you seek out confirming and disconfirming information and apply data to decision making wherever possible
You can find endless content on the need to be data driven, so I’m not going to highlight it much further here. Frameworks and best practices to improve decision making are for the most part not taught in any structured way outside of maybe a few management consulting firms. The content exists, it’s just not pulled into the mainline curriculum of many programs where you’d expect to find it.
Bias, and its impact on decision making was the last bit of research I did for this site. At the end of the day, we’re humans, and frankly we are not the best decision making machines if you are looking for consistency. Many factors can cloud your judgement - the frameworks help remove some, the rest comes from simply being aware of potential biases. It’s hard to avoid what you don’t know is there. By studying common types of bias that enter into the day to day of being a product manager you can recognize and adjust for potential biases in yourself and those you work with.
Putting it all together
In short, I think excellent product managers possess important qualities across three categories; hard skills, personality and judgement. Hard skills are often over-emphasized, personality under-emphasized and judgment is largely untouched. Using this multi-factor approach, you can come up with strategies for improving performance as a product manager at any level as well as how to improve hiring, coaching and performance management practices.
Need Help Hiring for Great Product Managers?
If you’d like help adopting a tested and proven product manager interview process please feel free to contact me or learn more at about learn more about how I may be able to help you find an excellent product manager.
