Essential Product Management Skills
The product manager role is becoming mainstream in most organisations, to position oneself for the role one needs to show proof of skills and knowledge in some specific domains. This article tries to compile the list of the top 3 essential domains that every intending product manager must acquire to be considered for the role and excel in it. For incumbent product managers, this article will serve as a checklist of skills to either acquire or improve on to excel in the role
Business analysis and analytics: The product manager should have intermediate to advanced business analysis skills and amateur to intermediate business analytics skills, one may need to do a wiki to know the difference but in simple English he should be able to understand fundamentally the end to end of how his product or service is delivered and how to improve upon it, as for analytics this simply means that he should be able to identify, measure and analyse the important metrics for his product and gain insight from them.
Project and Programme Management: As much as the operations management camp have valid points on this, am skewed towards the project management school of thought because every service or delivery is slightly different from the former even when it is to the same customer, a successful product manager should be able to execute flawlessly most of the time and this involves an intermediate to advanced understanding of initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing projects using several methodologies. He should also be able to do same for several projects simultaneously to achieve a common objective.
Sales and Marketing: I belong to the camp that of the sales and marketing role should be one and the same, for one to be successful as a product manager he must be able to make people aware of his product, recognise it, remember it and prefer it to other products. His product but be appropriately priced and customers must be able to access it whenever they want it in the most convenient way, he must be able to retain and increase his market share while putting in place strategies to remain relevant in the future.
One might ask what about business administration? For a product manager, it is not a deal breaker as long as the organisational design allows for the product manager to report to a business manager whose job it is to take care of finance, HR, strategy and the MBA list of courses. The next insight is that these skills are exactly the same for founders of start-ups, this is because most start-ups are single product focused at least till they become large enough for each feature of the product to becomes a product in its own right or till they have more products.
If you are planning to transition from a technical role to a management role within your organisation you might work on developing competencies along the 3 skills that have been listed. If you intend to begin learning about this skills, the Project Management Institute PMI and International Institute for Business Analysis IIBA will cover for most of the knowledge you require for project management and business analysis respectively, there are a number of specialisations on Coursera, Udacity and Edx that will get you started in business analytics. I am a big fan of Hinge marketing and Hubspot for sales and marketing knowledge.
In addition to seeking knowledge in these areas you should seek exposure and experience in this knowledge areas, most of the listed sources have some form of certification that will further cement your status as an excellent candidate for the product manager role. Do you think this list should be longer? please add to the list in the comment section.