Fight me: The best product managers have really shitty soft skills! đ©đ±
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 đ). Though most readers had very positive comments, one couldnât get past the colloquialism for excrement in a professional setting. One has to wonder if they are in the right professionâŠ
Itâs reprinted here in all its foul-mouthed glory â and with extra content!
Have you ever noticed that all the best product managers have really shitty soft skills?
âWait, what?â I hear you say. Bear with me.
See, I've been in âproductâ for more years than I care to admit: building products, managing products, and leading the teams and organisations who make them. Iâve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in product management and Iâve observed that to succeed in this field you need really, really shitty soft skills. Itâs the number one trait I look for when hiring, and what I coach my team members to develop.
Every day, product managers need to:
đ© Organise their shit
đ© Communicate about their shit
đ© And, most importantly, own their shit
Now that we had a chuckle, letâs unpack what this means, and how you could get better at it. Iâll address them in order of importance, from least to most, as that often mirrors the progression of development â both personal and career â 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 itâs 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 âproductâ happens.
Instead, learn toâŠ
Organise time. Time is your most precious resource, and there will never be enough of it. If you tried to do everything for everyone, youâd 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 âacceptance criteriaâ, I take them on an hour-long customer journey to understand what weâre 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, Iâve spent hours analysing logs and helping debug when itâs 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 itâs the 20 years Iâve been dealing with knowledge and information systems, but you canât 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 taxonomies⊠Actually, scratch that â give it a year, and your IA will be outdated. Just look at your Confluence and SharePoint from a year ago, and youâll be like Gandalfâs in Moria â no recollection.
Part of why product management is a âbeautiful messâ, is that things keep changing. There is some benefit in building an IA for long-term information storage and retrieval â for example, being able to pull down the list of customer calls where a certain feature was discussed â but youâll likely find that itâs a limited benefit thatâs rarely needed. Two years from now things would have changed so much that itâs 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, youâre 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 âgreat communicatorâ on their CV, and when probed itâs because they know where the spell-checker is. Well, this ainât it.
Communication is the most important skill for product managers because itâs 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.
Hereâs the second secret: 80% of communications is listening. Itâs absorbing what the other party is saying and what they arenât â leaving unsaid, circling around, or simply not important to them. Itâs about building empathy so you can appreciate their challenges and desires, then using this empathy to build products theyâd love and buy.
âActive listeningâ isnât a hack. Itâs not about repeating a personâs words as some Jedi mind trick. Iâve 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. Itâs 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, thereâs only one thing to do. You need to shut the eff up. Even if youâre right 9 out of 10 times, shut up, because the tenth time is when youâll 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. Itâs not about extracting quotes for the brochure; itâs about fundamentally connecting your offering to their world. Itâs why conducting customer interviews (and extracting the insights) is critical.
Iâve launched products that did the one thing, and because I understood the languages of different customers groups I could sell it â and teach our salespeople to sell it â 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 theyâve done everything by the book, while the other needed to know they are optimising costs and donât 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 âskillsâ might help you here.
Know why. When the executive HiPPO swoops in, you better know exactly why youâve selected what youâre 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 youâll 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, itâs a requirement for building empathy, ensuring alignment, and leading people as well as products. Iâve walked into tense meetings and diffused them by apologising for something that happened before I joined. It lets people move on, and thatâs what you want. After all, itâs not about you, but about your product.
Follow through. Anything thatâs 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 youâre 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, Iâll listen to you, and âbuyâ more from you â as a customer, as a colleague, and as a leader. Iâll know who to go to when the next big opportunity opens up.
Putting it together
Something I didnât 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 â and the rise of all the mapping techniques (Continuous Discovery is very popular example these days) shows Iâm not the only one.
So hereâs an overview of how I think about soft skills:
This is a screenshot of my favourite mind-mapping tool, but in case this doesnât come through clearly I keep a (mostly) the same copy on Miro here.
When I assess my product managers â or developers, or anyone, for that matter â I do so according to these dimensions. I have a âdefinition of goodâ (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 Iâm looking for and what Iâm observing. It isnât some Zen truth, but a working tool to explore a âsoftâ area.
You might notice that there is more to it that I touched upon in the article â thatâs because itâs a weighty subject, and the article only scratched the surface. In future posts Iâll delve deeper into some of the areas.
Hope you found this useful!