Core skills of a good product manager

Source: Internet
Author: User

in my previous work, has designed the Product Manager position core Competency model, today sees Michael's article, and I thought very much resembles, the translation organizes out and everybody shares.

1. Communication Skills

Excellent product manager must be a successful communicator, communication skills including verbal communication skills and writing communication skills. One of the main roles of the product manager is to be the center of communication, as shown in the following figure:

The communication ability of product managers is not only reflected in effective communication with people from different positions, but also in the following areas: communicating with people of different personalities . For example, most of the engineers are introverted, while most sales and marketing staff are very outgoing and have different "languages" when communicating with people in different jobs. If you want to communicate effectively, it is important to communicate the object of concern and easy to understand the "language." For example, when communicating with marketers and communicating with engineers, there are different ways to communicate: For marketers who say too much such things as "Database performance" and "Memory management algorithms" will undoubtedly upset them, while talking to engineers is too conceptual and does not help them design real implementation details; When communicating with bosses, you should focus more on the higher levels and avoid being too deep in the details.

2. No authorized leadership Ability

A successful product manager is a good leader, even without a clear mandate.

Product managers often need to perform leadership tasks in a number of areas, including leading the project team, leading the product strategy and blueprint designation, and leading cross-team product activities. In most cases, however, the product manager usually does not have a formal authorization from the company. At this point, whether to have "no authorized leadership" becomes the key to success.

How to lead a team without authorization, my advice is to use influence, negotiation, interpersonal relationships and other similar skills in a comprehensive way.

3. Learning Ability

The IT industry is a fast-changing industry, "unchanging may only change", new technologies continue to emerge, today's new products in a few months will become Da Lu Huo, or even faster. A good product manager must be able to learn quickly, even in a relatively new area. This capability makes it relatively easy to manage products in a constantly changing market and technology trend. Many companies make a mistake when recruiting product managers – they are overly fancy with experience. For example, if a company wants to do security software, they will return to the recruitment process stating "5 + years of experience in the field of security software". This is a wrong approach, and a better approach is to look for product managers with working experience in the software field, while at the same time learning quickly.

4. Business Sensitivity

Good product managers have a great sense of business, they know how to identify market opportunities, understand the importance of competitive differentiation, and can propose winning product strategies, pricing, promotional strategies, collaborative programs, and profit and loss analysis.

See these, don't think the product manager should be an MBA graduate. In fact, most good product managers do not have an MBA, but they are highly sensitive to business.

5, love the product

A good product manager has a heartfelt passion for the product. They tirelessly try a variety of new products, register a variety of product testing version, download the trial version of the product and carefully, a time to go online to see all kinds of new products website. They love to design good products, even if they are not their own company, they despise the products, even if it is developed by their own companies. Most importantly, they are obsessed with creating great products – whether it's a new product or an improvement in the existing product.

6, attention to detail, the pursuit of perfection

Excellent product managers to the details of the pursuit of attention to detail is the most important prerequisite for the development of excellent products, is the so-called "details determine success or failure." Steve Jobs once said:

imac notebooks are not just transparent colors and shell shapes, the core idea of this product is to become the most sophisticated consumer computer.

In the latest imac, we resolutely removed the cooling fan because we thought it would be more enjoyable to work with a non-buzzing computer. Of course, not that I decided to cancel the cooling fan, it requires engineers to make a great effort to find a better way to manage power and cooling. This is the product design at the beginning of the core concept of existence.

This is why users are willing to choose our products – the perfection of every detail to make it easier for users to use their computers.

The excellent product manager not only pays attention to the details of the product design, but also pursues perfection in other things, such as analyzing the competitive situation, making the project plan, and all other responsibilities.

7. Daily Product Management Ability

Excellent product manager with good daily product management capabilities, including: Write Market Requirements Document (MRD) and Product requirements document (MRD) for competitive Analysis Planning product Roadmap Production product presentation PPT Design user interface analysis product data, etc.

These core competencies not only contribute to the self-improvement of the product manager, but also provide reference value for the recruitment of product managers.

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