The ‘A to Z’ of a Product Manager(s)
A — Available — The PMs needs to be accessible most of the times owing to their immense cross functional presence.
B — Business First — This is obvious. Be it Impact Investing or a Normal Investing Business thinking comes first.
C — Collaboration — Collaboration is the KEY
D — Designer — Product Design is one of few very important aspects of product management and having this skill is a great one.
E — Empathetic — A kind of new norm emerging on account of design thinking , empathy at all levels is really important.
F — Focused — Laser focused on making the product a successful one :) , Better said than done though !
G — Go-To person. Sometimes this skill is needed in order to do things in someone’s else absence.
H — Humble. Humility is a key trait that can only comes with experience and PM needs to have this in order to make things work.
I — Innovative. No second thoughts on this one.
J — Juxtaposed. juxtaposition is basically a trait a PM has to deal with every time.
K — Knowledgeable. Breadth always matters for a PM. PMs need to deal with almost all aspects of the value chain and hence should be knowledgeable enough.
L — Learner. Quickly adapting to newness helps a lot.
M — Manager. OK so there has been lot of negativity around this word in recent times, however managing your time, managing resources, managing life cycles are really like routine for a product manager.
N — Nimble, Need of the hour.
O — Optimist. Seeing opportunities in challenges , [better said than done] !!
P — Problem Solver. The key ingredient. If you are not solving a problem , you are not building a product. [exceptions do occur]
Q — Quantitative / Qualitative. PM’s need to have both of these while understanding their metrics since those will then be used to decide the future.
R — Resourceful. PMs really need to deal with multiple resources, tools etc daily and keeping these resources handy makes their life a lot easier.
S — Strategic. Understanding long and short term strategic importance is needed in order to justify the product road map creation.
T — Technical. Eye brows raised huh.. However when technology is the product in these times, being technical really acts as a exponential catalyst in making your product perform well.
U -Unbiased.
V — Vocal. Communication is another key trait for product persons.
W -Writer. As a product person, its always a very good habit to write every single thing down. Computer can’t still read our brains..
X — Fill in this blank — — — -
Y — Youthful. Always remember ‘Age is just a number’ .Being youthful here means getting acquainted with new things that are prevalent and not getting obsolete
Z — Zombie .. ha ha.. nothing on ‘Z’ really .. :D
Disclaimer — Many of the attributes might not be available with a single person [ not with me either] , but striving/putting efforts to get these things will surely make things work.
