Skill Areas​ of a Product Manager

There are many elements and facets to being a PM, but ultimately it comes down to

Identify the most valuable problems to solve, enable your team to ship and iterate high-quality solutions quickly, and validate market impact.

Here is a link to the original blog article by Intercom.

5 Skill Areas​ to judge performance against at all levels:

1. Insight Driven
2. Strategy
3. Execution
4. Driving Outcomes
5. Leadership Behaviors

1. Insight Driven

​Customer focus: PMs represent customer needs accurately and fairly to create the best possible value for the company. They use customer insight to ensure that they deeply understand our customers’ problems, define the correct priorities to tackle and create a clear brief.

Analytics focus: PMs use data to inform decision-making and uncover new product opportunities for the company.

Competitive Insight: PMs understand the competitive landscape and industry trends and use this understanding to identify sustainable competitive advantages for the company.

2. Strategy

Strategy definition & influence: ​PMs set strategy and influence others to think big about where we are headed and how we will get there.

Roadmap creation & rationale: ​PMs are responsible for taking in a range of inputs and perspectives and clarifying and prioritizing problem focus areas for their teams. Why we are pursuing one set of priorities versus another should be clear from the rationale (both for readers and roadmap review participants.)

Alignment & Evangelism: ​As important as creating strategy & roadmaps is ensuring that these are understood and internalised by all. PMs are responsible for driving this alignment across teams & stakeholders.

3. Execution

Start with the problem: ​PMs are most directly responsible for ensuring their teams live and breathe this principle. To do it well, you must have a stubborn focus on understanding, refining, articulating the problem (or opportunity) your team is solving. When done well, the whole team is oriented around the problem and able to explain it themselves. And the PM ensures this understanding and articulation is continually evolved and improved.

Ship to learn​: PMs identify the biggest assumptions and risks to build clear hypotheses for learning. PMs are hungry for insights, open to proving themselves wrong, and most of all, ​share​ and ​act ​on the learning to deliver valuable product.

Ship the ​whole​ customer experience: ​PMs need to drive not just the development of a new feature or improvement, but the entire experience that surrounds it. This includes working across the business to determine: how new & existing customers find out about it, what the monetisation approach is, how sales will sell and how CS will support it…

4. Driving outcomes

Shipping is our heartbeat​: There can be no changed outcome and limited learning without shipping. Great product teams demonstrate a consistent shipping cadence; PMs help drive this. But it’s not just the speed at which we ship, it’s also the quality of the product.

Outcomes:​ What impact did your team have? All teams don’t have to demonstrate bottom-line (ie revenue) impact, but teams should be hungry to uncover and react to actual customer and business impact.

5. Leadership behaviours

Communication​: PMs inspire and motivate others to work towards a clear, compelling vision. They communicate clearly, concisely and assertively. And by building confidence, through being opinionated and persuasive.

Collaboration: ​PMs build engaged, high-performing collaborative and inclusive teams, ensuring that they fully leverage the best from those around them.

Ownership: ​PMs own it - for their product area, for their team, for the company. They grind it out, constantly looking for a way forward to deliver value.

Decisiveness: ​PMs are decisive. They quickly and assertively make meaningful decisions that enable us to deliver value for our customers at speed. They also help others make decisions faster by being appropriately inclusive but persuasive. They thrive in ambiguity and create clarity for those around them.

Core values:​ PMs live and breathe company’s core values