Quick Tips


What does it take to succeed as a newer product manager?

At a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, Tina Wyland, Associate Product Manager, Philips, Gina Dickson, Product Manager, TrueCommerce, and Jason Baim, Director of Product Management at TeleTracking Technologies, shared their thoughts and on-the-job experiences about succeeding in a position that carries both great responsibility and little authority. Among their insights:

• Build trust.  Build your credibility in the organization by becoming a quick responder.  Become a go-to person for others in your company.  Become an expert on your market and understand your product. 
• Prioritize.  As a product manager, there’s no such thing as catching up or getting everything done that needs to get done; things will come up from everywhere in the organization.  Product Managers have to adapt to change because they’re doing something different every day. So prioritization is a big part of the job – knowing what can wait, what has to be done right now, and making sure that other people understand why.   
• Tolerate confusion.  Product management is poorly defined in many organizations and it operates differently: where it reports, the expectations of what they’re supposed to do, how the role changes.  On top of that, job descriptions aren’t really accurate and it can be confusing going from one organization to the next. 
• Think big picture.  Because engineering and marketing resources are finite, a product manager’s greatest risk is listening to whoever screams the loudest without thinking about the larger picture.  Even if you don’t have P&L responsibility as a Product Manager, make sure you understand profit and loss, because that will guide good decisions. 
• Cultivate key product management skills.  Analytical skills such as understanding P&L statements, knowing margins, pricing strategies, and time management, as well as attention to detail, are all important.  But successful product managers also have soft skills including tact, influence, patience, open mindedness, good communications, and empathy for others.  As a PM, people will do things for you, but none of them actually report to you. 
• Seek feedback.  To grow as a product manager, seek feedback from others who can help to identify what you are seen as doing well and what you need to improve on.  But don’t take that feedback too personally. 
• Listen up.  Good listening and questioning skills are very important.  They can help to establish requirements from the customer and insight into what the market is doing.  Get behind what the customer says they want and learn what problems they’re actually facing.
• What do hiring managers look for when recruiting PMs?  When hiring someone as a Product Manager, domain knowledge is incredibly important.  But beyond that, it’s important that the candidate can articulate the business outcomes instead of just the development outcomes of that product. 

Becoming an Effective Product Manager Quick Tips Series:

• Part I of III: What does it take to succeed as a newer product manager?
• Part II of III: Working with customers and engineers
• Part III of III: Business practices for the effective product manager

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