What skills does a Product Manager need?
A successful Product Manager will draw on a variety of hard and soft skills when completing their day-to-day work. The most in-demand skills that any aspiring Product Manager should aim to develop include:
Product Managers need to understand the target market, customer demographics, market demand and value proposition. Commercial acumen helps Product Managers create popular products that meet specific customer needs.
Product Managers rely on market research and SWOT analysis to make product decisions. Analytical skills help Product Managers build sound, well-informed product strategies that are based on data insights.
Developing products often involves coordinating input from multiple teams. A Product Manager relies on project management skills to facilitate collaboration and ensure team members complete tasks within set timelines and budgets.
A Product Manager always aims to create products that solve specific problems for specific customers. A Product Manager with a problem-solving mindset can brainstorm product ideas and uncover the best possible solutions.
Product managers work cross-functionally, collaborating with anybody from engineers and data scientists, to designers and marketers. Strong communication skills enable Product Managers to secure stakeholder buy-in, nurture meaningful work relationships and keep teammates updated on an evolving strategy.
Product Managers leading a product development project are expected to break ideas down into actionable items, prioritise tasks and allocate responsibilities to teammates. Product Managers use their leadership skills to motivate colleagues, offer guidance and give constructive feedback, ultimately keeping a project on track.
From the identification of lucrative market opportunities, to the development of the product portfolio and its go-to-market execution, Product Managers are often required to think strategically. Product Managers also rely on their strategic skills to ensure that all teams, infrastructure and resources are aligned with a product vision.
Companies create products with the ultimate aim of generating more revenue. A sound grasp of financial acumen enables a Product Manager to forecast the cost of creating a product, budget for each phase of development and make cost effective decisions at every stage.
Inevitably, a range of choices have to be made when leading a product development project. Product Managers have to be able to weigh-up options, anticipate probable outcomes and make smart decisions that positively impact a finished product.
What software do Product Managers use?
There are a wide range of platforms that offer Product Managers the tools needed to quickly and efficiently develop products. While these platforms are primarily used by Product Managers and product teams, other departments can also use them to keep track of a product’s progress.
Some of the most powerful platforms that today’s Product Managers rely on include:
Jira is part of a family of products designed to make managing team projects easier. Product Managers use Jira to create roadmaps, product backlogs and sprint boards, which can be accessed and worked on by an entire team. Jira also helps Product Managers:
- Assign and manage tasks
- Estimate workflow
- Create project reports
- Perform project analytics
- Assign user permissions
Offering a range of functions for collaborative working, Jira allows Product Managers to plan, track and coordinate an entire team’s work using just one tool.
Product Managers also use Miro, a virtual whiteboard platform that helps a team to work creatively and visualise the progress of a project.
At an ideation phase, Miro is useful for brainstorming, sharing possible design ideas and making decisions as a team. As a project progresses, a visual management system like Miro has a number of advantages over to-do lists and other written project management documents:
- It simplifies even the most complex projects.
- It helps people understand at a glance what tasks need to be done and when.
- It creates open, real-time lines of communication.
- It gives the whole team visibility of what each team member is working on and the project timeline.
- It enables Product Managers to identify where work has slowed or stopped and take the necessary steps to fix it.
Jira and Miro combined help Product Managers ensure that the work carried out by digital teams is synchronous and collaborative. Behind every great product is a great product team, and behind every great product team are the platforms that facilitate teamwork.
monday.com is an online product management platform that helps teams of all sizes plan, track and schedule their daily tasks. From large-scale product roadmaps to daily iterations, monday.com enables teams to define clear ownership of tasks, track productivity, manage sprints and effectively collaborate.
monday.com is popular among Product Managers because it offers complete clarity over a project’s status. A static checkbox marking a task as “complete” or “incomplete” doesn’t provide enough information for team members to know where things really stand. Team members can provide detailed status reports in monday.com, indicating exactly what stage a task has reached, or even documenting any blockers that have stemmed the workflow.
Used by the likes of Microsoft and Apple, Productboard is a product management system that helps teams understand what target users need, prioritise which features to build (and when), and unify teammates around a product roadmap.
Productboard has the tools to aggregate customer research, with the customer feedback portal allowing teams to gather customer insights from multiple inboxes. It can even be used to produce detailed automated reports that can be used to determine product features. For Product Managers who are keen to work with an ongoing feedback loop, Productboard is the perfect platform.