No matter where you’re at in your PM journey, you’ve likely heard that to be a successful Product Manager, you need to identify powerful and necessary soft skills that will help you stand out in your role.
This isn’t limited to Senior Leaders or higher Executives. I’ve heard people say that they don’t need to learn communication until the need arises. Or that they only need to focus on the hard skills.
If you want to stand out as a Next Generation Product Manager, then you need to deploy skills that go beyond what you can learn in a textbook.
From properly conveying Product Vision to developing Product Sense, presenting a Product Strategy and leading a team to stakeholder communication, the list goes on and on.
If you want to stay competitive, be a top priority when job searching or when looking to move up the corporate tech ladders as a Product manager, you need these soft skills.
Why do you need soft skills as a Product Manager?
Product management involves a ton of task execution, product launch and collaboration with marketing,, A/B testing, gathering customer feedback and conducting market research.
As you attain the Senior Product Manager or Product Lead role, your priority will move from implementation to influence likewise building a firm working relationship with colleagues.
Yes, you’ll still be involved in executing tasks and product launches however you’re now a part of the decision-makers and leaders in the organization. Moreso, you are required to be actively involved with the career growth of team members and influence them to support the decisions you make for the product.
When you gain even more seniority and move up to the leadership level as a Group PM, Head of Product, or Chief Product Officer, relation to and working with people becomes more important. You’re expected to, as a PM, at a leadership level, lead teams, delegate tasks, reach important product decisions, and properly communicate with the stakeholders and important heads in the organization – these tasks require honed soft skills.
Powerful Product Manager Soft Skills
You need three or all of these powerful soft skills as a Product manager if you want to succeed and properly lead your team to success. These must-have product manager soft skills will also help you attain top leadership positions and become more respected.
Leadership And The Ability To Take Initiative
For product managers at all levels, not just senior product managers, leadership skills need to work in tandem with an initiative to get products into development and to meet deadlines.
This means that you should also possess some project management skills in order to see products through product development to product launch
Persuasion
A Product manager must master how to make compromises and help others so they can help them in the end. In other words, it’s about making necessary compromises that will benefit everyone at the end of the day.
The process of getting a product out to users can be a long one with countless roadblocks along the way. Product Manager soft skills need to include persuasion in order to get over or around roadblocks.
Persuasion is about prioritizing tasks especially when dealing with upper management that may be too demanding for those on the floor. It means saying NO to certain demands that are not beneficial finding a middle ground and being the voice of reason should be a priority for any PM.
Problem-Solving
At their core, products are intended to solve problems for a customer. Smart product managers need to create products that fundamentally achieve this. If you want to stand out, developing a problem-solving mindset is a key part of creating and brainstorming product ideas in the PM role.
Communication Skills
Whether you have great oratory skills or not, communication skills are essential for existence.
Whether written or spoken communication, you should be able to effectively communicate with and lead your team to get successful products launched on time and on budget.
Also, you will also need to be able to communicate with stakeholders outside of your team, particularly when reporting on product success or opportunities for improvement.
From the ideation phase until the official launch and marketing, a successful product relies on effective communication to go from an idea to a full-blown reality. As a Product Manager, you’ll need to communicate every single day with your teammates, upper management, users, stakeholders and other people that are necessary, it is the job of a PM to deliver the right message in the proper manner.
You’ll also need to communicate when conveying ideas directly or indirectly to others even in the middle of a complex breakdown. A PM is expected to take complex ideas from engineers and break it down so that the average users can relate and understand it. PMs also need to know how to communicate with stakeholders and transmit their ideas clearly to the product team.
Conclusion
What you need to remember, however, is that this skill will take some time to master. A PM also needs a good amount of experience to foster this skill. Nevertheless, any Product Manager who is an expert at persuasion will succeed in launching great products.
There you have it! I’m aware there are more soft skills. So, let me know what I missed in the comments.