Top 10 Skills required for a Product Management Role.

Being a successful product manager is all about constantly upgrading your skills to stay competitive in today’s job market. This role requires you to be creative, a keen observer, along with good communication and managerial skills.

A successful Product Manager is always interested in learning about new tools and techniques that can help them improve their skills and reach their goals. This not only makes him knowledgeable but also a better coworker, manager.

If you are looking for internships or jobs to get into product management, this is the perfect blog that you can use as a checklist for your preparation and improve these skills to increase your chances of being selected.

Before listing down the skills, there is one thing, i.e. A successful Product Manager is someone who has a mix of Technical and Soft skills. Technical skills enable him to come up with practical and innovative ideas for designing and developing products. Soft skills help him to build a strong relationship with the team and work with everyone efficiently.

Product Manager Skills

This is the list of all the skills you need to get a Product Manager role in a company, i.e., excel in your job or internship interviews and other selection rounds. So let’s get started.

1. Structured Thinking: A PM has to always stay in touch with different team members, clients and stakeholders through meetings. Efficiently communicating everything is of utmost importance and structured thinking is something that makes this communication of ideas way more effective and efficient. Every interviewer always makes sure to select only those candidates who present their thoughts in a structured way.
2. Consumer Empathy: Understanding how your consumers feel and how they want to feel is of paramount importance for a PM as the Quality of products, and consumer emotions are the driving forces. A great PM always has a way to get honest feedback about their products and remains aware of the requirements of the consumers.
3. Product and Business Acumen: Having an idea about what’s going around in the world(Product, Tech and Business world) helps a lot. To improve this, all you need to do is to read newspapers, newsletters, articles, books, etc. and have an opinion about things. If you understand how other businesses are growing, what they are doing right, and what turns out to be wrong for the companies, you are good to go.
4. Technical Knowledge: If you are applying for this role, you are expected to know about databases, a little bit of coding(Just the basics, which doesn’t take much time to learn), and should be updated on the technical stuff companies need are working on.
5. PRD Writing(Product Requirements Document): Here, the manager lists all the requirements of a product, including the product’s purpose, features, functionality, and behaviour. It helps everyone get an idea about what is required and what needs to be built. It acts as a guide to the developers, designers, and marketing teams.
6. Experience of working in teams or leading teams: A critical segment of the PM role is to keep interacting with all the teams and make sure that everything is going smoothly as expected to produce the desired output. If you have led a team or been a part of a team, making a change with combined efforts, then you have an upper edge over the rest of the candidates because this is expected from a PM. Interacting with people efficiently, communicating your ideas clearly, leading people is something you have to be comfortable with.
7. Design Sense: Design sense is something that comes through experience. You work on cases, build different products, take feedback from the users about the design and then with time comes experience giving you a clear understanding of what people will like and whatnot.
8. UX design/research: This includes prototyping, wireframing, storyboarding, etc. You would learn all these once you join a company as a Product Manager but knowing about these skills beforehand would always make things easier, and you would be able to devote time to learn more skills.
9. SQL and Analytics: Knowledge of SQL or the ability to analyse data is always an add on. Data analytics helps you identify the patterns existing in the choices of people and also helps to figure out the factors responsible for different choices of consumers. It’s worth exploring if you have an ample amount of time left with you, but it is not something necessary for starting your career as a Product Manager.
10. Tools: PMs use a variety of tools on a daily basis. Some of the tools are Trello, Figma(Design work), etc. These are the tools that will be of great help, so do check these out if you have time.

These were the top 10 skills companies seek in their candidates through tests, tasks or interviews. Here we are going to share the resources required to master these skills. Let’s start.

Resources for Product Manager Role

Online Resources

There are numerous resources available on the internet which have their pros and cons. It has really become easy to access all the resources available on the internet and learn from them but at the same time having a lot of choices in front of us make us confused about what needs to be done and what not also, how to sort these according to our requirements.

Don’t worry we have already done that for you so that you can completely focus on your preparation and learn whatever is required from the best people and resources.

Stay Updated

You can always follow Newsletters, medium articles, conferences, etc., to keep yourself updated about everything going around related to products. You can also refer to these resources.

1. Mind the Product: Here, you can find hundreds of articles that you can read to clarify all your doubts about Product Management and stay updated about all the things happening.
2. Product Hunt: This site contains all the information about the popular product available as well as a detailed description of upcoming products, which makes it an amazing place to keep yourself updated.
3. The Hustle: An amazing newsletter for all the business and tech news.
4. Company Blogs: Most of the large companies have their blog sites where they post about their companies and valuable information for the enthusiasts to know about their business and strategies. This can be of great help, do check out the blog sites of the companies you like.

Online Courses

If you want to learn about Product Management, then you can also start with a few courses to develop a clear understanding of each topic. Here we have mentioned a few sites that offer excellent courses.

1. Try Exponent: Try Exponent is the site where there are many courses designed by experts for Product management enthusiasts. Anyone can learn from these courses and then practice all the skills required to get a Product Manager role.
2. Stellarpeers: It is a community platform that helps people prepare for Product Management Interviews. Here you can find like-minded people, interact and practice with them, which results in improvement of all the group members.
3. PM exercises: This site contains a huge number of questions that are asked in PM interviews. Anyone can get an idea about the questions and then prepare for them. It also provides the feature of mock interviews, so you can try those also.
4. Product School: You can enrol yourself in specific courses to learn the basic as well as advanced topics of Product Management. It also has many blogs that you can refer to learn about the subject.

PM Communities

PM communities are the places where one can find people who are Product Managers or somewhat related to the role. These are the places where you can interact with people living the life you wish to live. It is a great place to network and grow with the community.

Some of the famous PM communities are:

1. The Product Folks: It is a volunteer-driven community of people who are passionate about product management and want to bring a chance through their efforts.
2. Product School: Here, you can read blogs, share ideas, learn from courses, etc.
3. Subtle Asian Product Management: This is a Facebook group that also provides valuable resources for the role.
4. Lewis Lin PM Community: A slack community of Product enthusiasts. You can also find your study partner here. It makes the journey enjoyable.

Books

Books are the best when it comes to learning at your own pace. Here we have made a list of a few fabulous books which can be very useful during your preparation journey.

1. Preparing for Product Interviews: A Product-ive guide to Landing a Job in PM by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas
2. Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro
3. Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews by Lewis C Lin
4. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
5. The Product Manager Interview: 164 Actual Questions and Answers by Teng Lu and Lewis C Lin
6. Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy by Parth Detroja, Aditya Agashe and Neel Mehta
7. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love(Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan

You can use all these resources and make the best use of the time available to you. I agree these are a lot of resources, and it won’t be easy to cover all these. Let me remind you that Product Managers need to master the skill of Time management. So manage your time and complete your preparation — all the best for your future. Keep Learning.