Equip Yourself with These 5 Skills to Excel as a Product Manager
There are plenty of websites on the internet that talk about product management and the role of a product manager. However, they fail to delve deep into the business concept gaining prominence in the business milieu.
Product executive and author Marty Cagan, in his popular book- Inspired, described the job of product manager as finding a product that is usable, feasible, and valuable.
Product managers are individuals who identify customer needs and match them with the larger business objective. They create a product mix that benefits the customers and the business. As a product manager, an individual should be equipped with certain skills that prepare them for the job. It is a role that requires more than what one learns at business school. If you aspire to become a product manager, here are the top 5 skills that are a must-have for the job.
Top 5 Product Manager Skills
Product managers are individuals who play a crucial role in the product development stage. They perform an array of roles that ensure a smooth product launch. Here are the top five skills every product manager must possess to gain efficiency and productivity.
Technical and business acumen
Martin Eriksson believes that a product manager must possess one of the following skills to excel in their job – business, technology, and user experience. Having a penchant for technology will make one’s work as a product manager easier because product managers often communicate with product engineers to ensure the product meets the customers’ requirements in terms of form, function, and user experience.
Therefore, having technical acumen makes it easy to communicate with the product engineer. Similarly, product managers closely work with business managers to ensure that the marketing mix incorporates their customer feedback and inferences. Therefore, being skillful in technical and business aspects of a product makes communication easy and efficient.
Industry expertise
Product managers should be well-informed about the industry updates, specifically because it affects the trajectory of their products. This enables them to be experts in their field of work and implement innovative strategies for product management. Moreover, their expertise helps understand the product life cycle, customer requirements, product management process, and sales forecast.
Curiosity
Curiosity is considered a critical skill for product managers, and it is linked to better performance, better communication, innovation, and more. Product managers need to be curious to dig deeper into the root cause of a problem and find novel solutions. Moreover, curiosity is the emotion that drives customers to a product. Similarly, it drives product managers to discover new ways to collect and evaluate data and solve business problems.
Intuition
Another skill that product managers should possess is intuition. Intuitive managers can successfully understand the motivation of the customer to buy a product, which, when collated with business goals and promotional strategies, can yield success for the organization.
Intuitiveness also helps product managers forecast market changes and implement changes in the business strategies accordingly.
Humility
Product managers are required to foster an environment where everyone can be comfortable and open. Therefore, humbleness plays a great role in product management. A good product manager is humble and empathetic towards their customers, workforce, and others. Embracing humility not only helps product managers to perform their roles and responsibilities prolifically but also nestles curiosity.
Back in the day, product management was not an integral part of the organization. And today, it plays a crucial role in the product development process. As a result, different job opportunities are opening up in the field. The product manager is one such role that is gaining prominence in the current milieu. Here are some intricate details about the product manager’s job description, and salary that helps one foray into the field without a shadow of doubt.
Product Manager Job Description
A product manager’s job description involves aligning customer needs with their product and business goals. They also conduct market research and draw inferences from the research to implement in the existing products. As product managers are an integral part of the product management process, they have specific roles and responsibilities that are inevitable. We’ve put together a few of the product manager’s roles and responsibilities.
Product Manager Roles and Responsibilities
1. Collaborating with teams: Product managers collaborate with different teams during a product life cycle to evaluate performance.
2. Planning and implementing strategies: Product managers are the go-to person for product management. Therefore, they oversee different product strategies. Furthermore, they also take place in planning product strategies.
3. Deciding product specifications: Product managers are responsible for every specification enlisted in the product. They try to balance business goals, customer needs, and market requirements while ideating product specifications.
4. Analyzing data: Research encapsulates the job description of product managers. They are responsible for collecting and analyzing data and drawing inferences from it to implement business strategies to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
5. Customer relationship management: A product manager’s main aim is to talk with customers to gauge what they truly desire. This process is also called customer relationship management (CRM). It involves businesses interacting with customers to collect feedback and empathize with them.
Product Manager Salary
Product managers, on an average, earn about ₹ 16,00,000 annually. However, the figure is relative. A product manager’s salary can vary depending on the qualifications, organization, and work experience one endorses.
If you are foreseeing a career as a product manager, you must know the preparations one must undertake. Further in the article, we will be discussing the preparation process of a product manager and overlooking certification courses to ease the process.
Product Manager Preparation
To become a product manager, one must have a bachelor’s or master’s degree in business and administration. This degree will equip individuals with the roles, responsibilities, and other important nitty-gritty about product management. Even if you do not want to take up a bachelor’s or master’s degree, you can undertake a certification course in leadership and management from a reputed institute to upskill yourself and scale your career. It will help you gain in-depth theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills in the domain in a short span of time. Emeritus India offers various leadership and management certification courses in partnership with world-class universities. Enroll for the course today to become a successful product manager.
