Consider this before your next product gig
Aspiring and tenured PMs must consider three primary factors before taking on their next product gig: core competencies, emotional intelligence, and company fit. Successful PMs have mastered the core competencies, have a high emotional intelligence and work for the right company, perhaps, creating industry disrupting products.
Core Competencies
Below are the core competencies every PM must have before they dive into their PM role.
Empathy
Problem Identification
Solution Ideation
Solution Prototyping
Solution Testing
Solution Shipping
These are also the same components used in design thinking process, namely, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. The best PMs hone these skills over years of defining, shipping, and iterating on products.
Emotional Intelligence
As a PM, you should not just know the dos and don’ts of user interviews, but also empathize with the user, and define the pain points your product or feature will address. The four key traits of emotional intelligence that relate to a PM role, as defined by Daniel Goleman, are:
Relationship Management: This is probably the most vital skill a PM should have. Forging a good relationship with internal and external stakeholders will enable you to negotiate, resolve conflicts and align everyone with the shared vision in a better way. A genuine relationship with your internal stakeholders can lead to more support when you need an engineer to fix something quickly and outside working hours. While with your external stakeholders, this can be the difference between irate customers and confident customers that says, “We know you’ll fix this!”
Self-Awareness: PMs must actively pursue self-awareness to keep their own personas outside of the user interviews to make sure they develop a feature that makes their end-users lives easier and not their own. PMs are often super-users of their respective products, hence, if not self-aware, a PM can push feature prioritization that eases their life instead of their customers. This can result in conflicts between stakeholders and developing a feature that does not see user adoption can lead to stakeholders losing confidence over the PM.
Self-Management: Every PM needs to wear multiple hats and has multiple meetings with multiple stakeholders. Self-management plays a key role in staying sane and being on track with developing features, managing deadlines, market demands, resource constraints all at once. If a PM cannot maintain their emotions and keep it cool under pressure, they can easily lose sight of the roadmap and pivot in the wrong direction. The best PMs know how to push hard on the right priorities, with urgency but without conveying any stress or panic. They also know when to take a step back, take a breath and regroup.
Social Awareness: According to Goleman, the competencies associated with being socially aware are empathy, organizational awareness, and service. PMs must understand customers’ concerns about the product, as much as they understand the sales teams concern on how to sell the product, or the support teams concern on how to support it, or the engineering team’s concern on how to build it. PMs also must understand their organizational resources to effectively get the required outcome. The best PMs also service their customers with a product that addresses their jobs to be done, which ultimately drives product market fit.
Company Fit
If the best PMs have exceptional core competencies and high emotional intelligence, does that mean they are destined to succeed? Not actually. In real life, taking these soft and hard skills and applying them to the right company is what will guarantee success, immediately or in the longer run. There are many factors to consider for the role, such as the type of product you’re building (B2B, B2C), the people with whom you’ll work, the overall company culture (diverse, inclusive, transparent, flexible work hours, remote option) and the compensation and benefits.
Hence, if you’re thriving to be a great PM, consider the above before signing on to your next gig. Developing core competencies will be an ongoing activity throughout your career, emotional intelligence will help you thrive in stakeholder alignment. But where you work, how they work, and who you work with and for directly, will ultimately determine your success in the longer run.