Self-Awareness: The Key to Becoming an Effective Product Manager

Profile of an Excellent Product Manager

Background

As the diagram above highlights, being a successful product manager requires you to master a variety of skills. Hard skills are the table stakes required to be considered for a PM role. Mastery of soft skills are what set amazing PMs apart from the rest and eventually help certain people to move up to larger roles with more responsibility. And in the end, the ability to make high quality decisions over and over again with positive outcomes for the business makes for the most effective PMs.

No One Is Ready for Their First Product Manager Job

Having lived through the transition and knowing so many others who have as well, I can say that no one is fully ready the first time they get a product management position. There’s too much you need to know, and a lot still can only be gained from experience in the role. Beyond that, much of the soft skills and judgement are things you need to adapt and grow into once you start. This is why self-awareness is probably the most important of all of the soft skills listed in the profile. You have to grow into this role, you will need to do work to develop every skill listed and the only way to do it is if you are paying attention to current state, your level of effectiveness, and where you need to focus.

What is Self-Awareness Really?

A while back I found this HBR post by Tasha Eurich that I felt really did a good job of breaking down the topic, especially as applied to product management. I strongly suggest reading the whole thing, but I’ll summarize some key points here for the sake of relating back to product management. First off

The first, which we dubbed internal self-awareness, represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others.

Internal self-awareness is the basis for having a mental model of where you are and where you need to get to. The first step is simply exposing yourself to a broader definition of what being a successful product manager means and what is required. From that point, you need to be paying attention to signs and feedback as to how you are doing all of these factors. I think this really helps with the hard skills, specifically the level of technical aptitude and PM domain skills. When you first start, you need to assess whether you have the right technical aptitude for your team and target customer and whether you’ve got enough of the PM basics to work effectively with your development team.

Internal self-awareness is also key to being aware of bias in your decision making. Simply put, humans are terrible at making consistent decisions based on facts over and over again. The very nature of how our brain works is both amazing and opens us to all types of long-standing and transient biases that can cause us to make a potentially bad call. Having some awareness of your mental state, what triggers you, and the types of biases that can most impact decision making gives you the opportunity to avoid them.

Next Eurich’s article continues with:

The second category, external self-awareness, means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors listed above. Our research shows that people who know how others see them are more skilled at showing empathy and taking others’ perspectives.

Fortunately or unfortunately being a product manager means you get more feedback than anyone would ever ask for themselves. The central nature of the role, and the fact that junior PMs are typically working with more senior people from other functions, means that a product manager will receive lots of direct feedback about their performance from all over the place. The role comes with a lot of responsibility and the potential for a large (positive or negative) impact on the business. As such, most people don’t “wait” to provide feedback, usually constructive, if they see something that concerns them with a PM on the team.

Even if what you are hearing is mostly fair, it can be a lot and it’s easy to feel like you’re messing up and for “imposter syndrome” thoughts to start popping into your head. It’s been true for me at every level - every time I moved up the bar moved and at some level this started over again. The trick is not to get overwhelmed, have a filter to analyze and evaluate the feedback, and have a plan to act. Being attune to external self-awareness is key to developing many of the soft skills listed in the profile: ownership, confidence & humility, and empathy are all skills that make you more effective at working with other people.

Becoming an Effective Product Manager is the Hardest Job You’ll Ever Have

People start as product managers at many levels and at many points in their careers, but everyone comes in with gaps. The best ones are aware of these and start to close them immediately through iteration and hard work. Use the PM profile to assess where you are currently and prioritize which things are the most important to deal with. What things are potentially fatal in the role, which are less urgent, and which are simply needed to demonstrate that you are ready for the next level up?

It’s also critical that you have a manager, a mentor, and some peers that can give you critical feedback and sanity check all the other feedback you receive from the rest of the organization. As you work with the people you trust to talk through situations that arise, be sure you are asking objective “what,” not “why” questions. The Eurich article does a great job of explaining how most people who think they are self-aware are not, and pretty much everyone is terrible at doing introspection in an unbiased way.

It’s important to point out here that you should not interpret this article as suggesting product managers should live in their own heads and be massively self-critical all of the time. Quite the opposite. You have to live in the positive and proactive, acting decisively and confidently and moving things forward. My reason for making this part of the profile and writing this is because I’ve met so many promising product managers that were not interested in developing their skills for whatever reason. You can certainly get hired as a product manager without working on any of this. You will struggle to stay in the role, move up, and be effective if you do not put in the work on yourself.

Becoming an effective product manager is the hardest job you’ll ever have largely because you are the thing that needs the work, and a lot of it is rewiring how you interact with other people under pressure and in tough situations. That means having lots of not-awesome experiences, persevering, learning from them, and applying what you picked up in the next go round. If you can figure it out however, it’s the most fulfilling job you’ll ever have.