Fight me: The best product managers have really shitty soft skills! š©š±
A possibly contentious - but absolutely true! - observation about the best product managers and leaders out there!
This article originally appeared on Mind The Product. They have toned down the language a bit, which made it lose some of the punch (and humour š). Though most readers had very positive comments, one couldnāt get past the colloquialism for excrement in a professional setting. One has to wonder if they are in the right professionā¦
Itās reprinted here in all its foul-mouthed glory ā and with extra content!
Have you ever noticed that all the best product managers have really shitty soft skills?
āWait, what?ā I hear you say. Bear with me.
See, I've been in āproductā for more years than I care to admit: building products, managing products, and leading the teams and organisations who make them. Iāve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in product management and Iāve observed that to succeed in this field you need really, really shitty soft skills. Itās the number one trait I look for when hiring, and what I coach my team members to develop.
Every day, product managers need to:
š© Organise their shit
š© Communicate about their shit
š© And, most importantly, own their shit
Now that we had a chuckle, letās unpack what this means, and how you could get better at it. Iāll address them in order of importance, from least to most, as that often mirrors the progression of development ā both personal and career ā of product managers.
Organisation
Sadly, this is what far too many product managers think is the core of product management. Writing a comprehensive user story; Colour-coding backlogs; Playing estimation poker like itās a high-roller room in Las Vegas. This is, almost exactly, the wrong kind of focus. Jira is where good ideas go to die, not where āproductā happens.
Instead, learn toā¦
Organise time. Time is your most precious resource, and there will never be enough of it. If you tried to do everything for everyone, youād work 60+ hours a week, still leave things undone, and burn out.
Instead, learn the difference between Urgent and Important, learn to identify which activities have a high leverage (high impact to effort ratio). For example, I leave writing of routine tickets to the developers. When they clamour for āacceptance criteriaā, I take them on an hour-long customer journey to understand what weāre hoping to achieve and why. Pretty soon, even the shiest of developers build an innate understanding of the users, their needs and constraints. On the other hand, Iāve spent hours analysing logs and helping debug when itās a critical bug that could bring the system down.
The basic rule is: Urgent and Important = do it now! Important but not urgent = block time in your calendar. Urgent but not important? Delegate. Not urgent and not important = eliminate.
Take a look at your calendar, and colour-code your meetings. See where the time-sinks are. Learn when your productive zone is, and when your team needs you. Block time for the important stuff, and ruthlessly eliminate the waste in the same way you learnt to say no to feature requests from sales.
Organise information. Maybe itās the 20 years Iāve been dealing with knowledge and information systems, but you canāt beat a good information architecture - the hierarchical classification systems and tag taxonomies that get librarians excited and make information retrieval a cinch. Spent hours methodically and meticulously organising folders and tag taxonomiesā¦ Actually, scratch that ā give it a year, and your IA will be outdated. Just look at your Confluence and SharePoint from a year ago, and youāll be like Gandalfās in Moria ā no recollection.
Part of why product management is a ābeautiful messā, is that things keep changing. There is some benefit in building an IA for long-term information storage and retrieval ā for example, being able to pull down the list of customer calls where a certain feature was discussed ā but youāll likely find that itās a limited benefit thatās rarely needed. Two years from now things would have changed so much that itās just not worth spending hours on it weekly.
Instead, go for lightweight organisation. Record, publish, tag, and move on. Focus on clarity in the notes, on capturing information and extracting the important nuggets (like a customer interview, with sections for raw observations and a summary of takeaways). Slap on some reasonably consistent tags to aid searching. Send it to the relevant people (not just everyone, but those who need it), and talk about it when needed. Then move on.
If you can find information, if you can tell someone over a Slack message where to find it, youāre doing OK. Focus on information, on actionable intelligence, rather than noisy raw data or prescriptive catalogues, and ensure this is what gets disseminated.
Communications
It seems like everyone has āgreat communicatorā on their CV, and when probed itās because they know where the spell-checker is. Well, this aināt it.
Communication is the most important skill for product managers because itās what you do 90% of the time. Delivering presentations? Sure. But also writing user stories, interviewing users, negotiating deadlines and resources, diagramming, and chatting online or IRL. All of these are about building a shared understanding and conveying ideas.
Hereās the second secret: 80% of communications is listening. Itās absorbing what the other party is saying and what they arenāt ā leaving unsaid, circling around, or simply not important to them. Itās about building empathy so you can appreciate their challenges and desires, then using this empathy to build products theyād love and buy.
āActive listeningā isnāt a hack. Itās not about repeating a personās words as some Jedi mind trick. Iāve seen many junior product managers start to fidget when a customer (or an internal stakeholder) is going off on a tangent or when they think they understand what the customer is saying and want to save time and jump to the solution. Itās about leaving space to grow empathy with two-way feedback.
If you find your mind sparking off ideas when you can see the problem and just want to help the person by jumping to the solution, thereās only one thing to do. You need to shut the eff up. Even if youāre right 9 out of 10 times, shut up, because the tenth time is when youāll learn something new.
Listen to people without thinking of your response (or more realistically: when you do, just get back to the present and focus on them). Summarise what you heard them say to crystalise what you understood and have the space to be corrected. And then tie whatever message you want to deliver back to what they said.
As a bonus, when you take the time to listen to people you learn to speak in the same language, which is key to marketing and sales messaging. Itās not about extracting quotes for the brochure; itās about fundamentally connecting your offering to their world. Itās why conducting customer interviews (and extracting the insights) is critical.
Iāve launched products that did the one thing, and because I understood the languages of different customers groups I could sell it ā and teach our salespeople to sell it ā to different people. The police investigator that had a backlog of digital crimes and the lawyer that has reams of paperwork to sift through perceived the exact same problem and solution with different concerns: one was worried about the sheer number of cases, about proving that theyāve done everything by the book, while the other needed to know they are optimising costs and donāt have to be awake at 3am before a court date.
Other ways to improve your communications: Go read Presentation Zen before you next open PowerPoint. Join Miro and Coda.io, subscribe to their mailing lists, and learn about interactive two-way comms and meetings. Learn the art of email-fu, of CTAs and info tailored to your audience. Even write a short story (or a novel) and get a professional editor to learn self-editing.
Ownership
This is the hardest to define category, but the most important. It also takes time to build in each new role that you take on. If you can organise your time and extract information from noise, if you build empathy and clearly communicate across different mediums and audiences, the last step is to own your shit.
Three āskillsā might help you here.
Know why. When the executive HiPPO swoops in, you better know exactly why youāve selected what youāre doing. Why are we building this feature? Because we heard a handful of customers talk about the problem it solves and want to see if others take it up. Why did we choose that database? Because our customers need these queries faster than the cost of that storage. Why should I care? Because we can show you how to close more sales.
Be humble. Product management is a profession where youāll either thank everyone for their amazing contributions or apologise for why you messed up. Leaving your ego at the door is not just a platitude, itās a requirement for building empathy, ensuring alignment, and leading people as well as products. Iāve walked into tense meetings and diffused them by apologising for something that happened before I joined. It lets people move on, and thatās what you want. After all, itās not about you, but about your product.
Follow through. Anything thatās worth doing is worth understanding, planning, budgeting, scheduling, and reporting on. Worth doing right. Be ruthless about what you select to do, but do those things to the best of your abilities. Know why and what, know how much, know when and how, and clearly communicate this before, during, and after. If you made a promise, deliver on it. If you took action-items, act on them.
How do those things translate into ownership, and why does it matter? It comes down to trust. If you show that you have a good reason for what youāre doing, while at the same time, you really listen to feedback and take it on, if you have the information at your fingertips and can convey it in the right way, if you demonstrate both passion and compromise, and just get shit done, then I can trust you.
If I trust you, Iāll listen to you, and ābuyā more from you ā as a customer, as a colleague, and as a leader. Iāll know who to go to when the next big opportunity opens up.
Putting it together
Something I didnāt get to include in the original post. As I mentioned, I like to visualise and use mind-maps when I study a topic. I find it helps me organise information better ā and the rise of all the mapping techniques (Continuous Discovery is very popular example these days) shows Iām not the only one.
So hereās an overview of how I think about soft skills:
This is a screenshot of my favourite mind-mapping tool, but in case this doesnāt come through clearly I keep a (mostly) the same copy on Miro here.
When I assess my product managers ā or developers, or anyone, for that matter ā I do so according to these dimensions. I have a ādefinition of goodā (a future article, no doubt) that helps me delve into where a person is, and what areas might need to grow. While not as formal when you branch out further from the main topics, codifying it in this way helps me keep a mental model of what Iām looking for and what Iām observing. It isnāt some Zen truth, but a working tool to explore a āsoftā area.
You might notice that there is more to it that I touched upon in the article ā thatās because itās a weighty subject, and the article only scratched the surface. In future posts Iāll delve deeper into some of the areas.
Hope you found this useful!