So you wanna be a product manager? Why?
This is the most important question to ask yourself before getting into product management (PM). In this post you will learn about why and why not to get into PM.
Let’s start with why not before going into why.
Why not?
Over the years I have heard various reasons why people want to get into product management. Hopefully these are not one of your reasons…
- I love to be the boss, PM is like the CEO of the product.
- It has the word “Manager” in it.
- I heard it has better pay.
- It’s a hot trend right now.
- It’s a way to get into tech companies.
- I love project management so I should get into product management.
- I am just bored at my current role. 🙄
In my experience, all of the above are the wrong motivations (and some are not even true) for getting into product management.
Why?
So what are the right reasons?
- I love to understand and solve customer/user pain points.
- I want to collaborate with teams to craft elegant solutions to solve user problems.
- I’d like to provide value to customers and capture business value.
- I love variety of problems, like design, business, and tech challenges.
- I have the top skills needed to contribute as a PM.
In my experience all the above are the right motivations, especially the first one. Now, let’s explore the top skills needed to succeed as a PM mentioned in the last point.
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Top 3 PM skills
- Empathy: You should be able to feel people’s pain points being in their shoes. You should be able to empathize with customers, sales, engineering, customer support, and many more stakeholders to relate to their pain points.
- Communication: Once you understand the problem, you’d have to share your vision to the rest of the team. You should be able to communicate the problem, its importance, and solution options to cross functional teams.Â
- Prioritization: Once you have multiple solutions and ideas from interacting with multiple stakeholders, you’d need awesome prioritization skills. You should be able to determine which ideas to pursue and which ideas to kill, which product features ship first and which are last.
I hope you found your reason to become a PM. Thank you and stay tuned! My next post goes in depth into what is product management, how do the roles differ in various companies, and what do PMs actually do in their daily jobs.
By the way, why do you want to become a Product Manager?
